Where world is – nuclear face-off with Kim, Trump

‘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 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). They didn’t talk like Donald Trump either (“North Korea best not make any more threats to the US. 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 of nuclear war after the Soviet Union put nuclear missiles into Cuba to deter a US invasion. It was a terrifying time, but neither US President John F Kennedy nor the Soviet leaders used violent language. They stayed calm, and backed away from the brink.

Kubrick’s fictional leaders had to stay sane, too; only his generals and civilian strategic “experts” were crazy. Anything else would have been too implausible even for a wild satire like Strangelove. Now we live in different times.

Trump may not understand what his own words mean, but he is threatening to attack North Korea if it makes any more threats. That’s how it will be translated into Korean. Pyongyang will assume the US attack will be nuclear, since it would be crazier to attack a nuclear-armed country using conventional weapons.

Is this where the world finds itself ? ‘Fraid so. Although a nuclear war with North Korea at this point wouldn’t even muss America’s hair – the few North Korean ICBMs would probably go astray or be shot down before they reached the US – it could kill millions of Koreans on both sides of the border.

A million or so Japanese might die (depending on fallout), and a few tens of thousands of US soldiers in western Pacific bases (from targeted strikes). 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 are “carefully examining” a plan for a missile attack on the US base on Guam. That way, they could “signal their resolve” in a crisis by only hitting one isolated American military target. The hope would be that such a limited attack would not unleash an allout US nuclear counter-attack that would level North Korea.

“Limited” nuclear war 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 people will remain severely rational and unemotional while under attack by nuclear weapons.

Thinking about limited nuclear war, while unrealistic, is evidence that the planners are starting to get scared about an all-out nuclear war. Nevertheless, we are entering a dangerous phase of the process, not least because the other two major nuclear powers in the world, China and Russia, have land borders with North Korea. And neither loves or trusts the US.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the US was not seeking to change the North Korean regime last week, although he was contradicted by Trump. In the long run, that is the unpalatable but acceptable way out of this crisis. There is no other way out.