Trump and Kim’s dangerous game of cat and mouse
‘‘I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, Mr President, but I do say not more than 10 or 20 million dead, depending on the breaks.’’ So said General ‘‘Buck’’ Turgidson, urging the US president to carry out a nuclear first strike, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film Dr Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
But nobody in Kubrick’s movie talked like Kim Jong-un (‘‘American bastards would be not very happy with this gift sent on the July 4 anniversary,’’ he crowed, celebrating North Korea’s first successful test of an ICBM). They didn’t talk like Donald Trump either (‘‘North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.’’)
Kubrick’s film came out the year after the Cuban missile crisis, when the world went to the brink could kill many millions of Koreans on both sides of the border.
A million or so Japanese might die as well (that would depend on the fallout), and a few tens of thousands of US soldiers in western Pacific bases (from targeted strikes). Indeed, as the scale of the potential disaster comes home to North Korean strategists, you can see them start to play with the idea of a ‘‘limited nuclear war’’.
North Korean planners have announced that they are ‘‘carefully examining’’ a plan for a missile attack on the big US base on Guam. In that way they could ‘‘signal their resolve’’ in a crisis by only hitting one isolated American military target. Their hope would be that such a limited attack would not unleash an all-out US nuclear counter-attack that would level North Korea.
‘‘Limited’’ nuclear war typically becomes a favourite topic whenever strategists realise that using their cherished nuclear weapons any other way means unimaginable levels of death and destruction. It has never been credible, because it assumes that