Jana Winter, Foreign Policy: California Is Already Preparing for a North Korean Nuclear Attack
Beware of radioactive pets, and don’t expect the feds to show up anytime soon.
With U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un trading insults and threatening war, California officials are taking the threat of nuclear exchange seriously.
Noting the heightened North Korean threat, the Los Angeles-area Joint Regional Intelligence Center issued a bulletin last month warning that a nuclear attack on Southern California would be “catastrophic” and urged officials in the region to shore up their nuclear attack response plans.
The report cites North Korea’s late July test of an intercontinental ballistic missile that could, in theory, reach the West Coast of the United States. “North Korea’s propaganda videos feature ruins of San Francisco and Washington,” the document says.
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WNU Editor: I lived during the Cold War .... being prepared for a nuclear war was a given. Twenty-five years later .... it's sad to see that what was the past is now rearing its ugly head again.
3 comments:
The targets in california are worth trillions and trillions. You have to keep in mind that this state alone by itself is the fourth or fifth largest economy in the world.
Most of it coming from silicon valley and then LA (Hollywood). Both, silicon valley and hollywood influence the world through western values and western images beyond just there mere financial reach. If you think about the US as a global power, there's 4-5 pillars: 1. its military might, 2. Its political and financial power 3. Its technology and 4. Its media/cultural dominance in the world. Half of them are split across silicon valley (media and technology) and Hollywood (media/culture projection). The Chinese, Iranians and a few others HATE the technological and especially cultural dominance that the US/western values have around the world, and see both as major risks to their own power - externally and internally. It should be no surprise to anyone that all of our major technology companies - Facebook, Whatsapp, Google are blocked in China. Not just because they don't want the competition, but also because they don't want unfiltered western information (propaganda). You can take my word for it, the Chinese hope that north Korea manages to nuke either LA or SF (SF is preferred). It will guarantee their dominance and "the Chinese century" to finally come. Something they want more than you and I want air to breath.
The US could annihilate North Korea but if just one nuke gets through and hits a major city on the west coast the cost in money, lives and prestige would be enormous.
If you drop the same bomb on Pyongyang and San Francisco (both potential targets in a 1:1 nuclear exchange) you would see about the same number of civilian deaths on both side, but a 100-1,000 fold economic cost to the US. That's the real issue here.
A 140kt device - that's about the size North Korea's largest test was to date - would almost completely destroy Pyuongyang and SF downtown and the valley. The destruction would be worse than Hiroshima. However, SF downtown and the valley have such an immense density of financial wealth, technology, infrastructure, patent holdings and brainpower (which powers really American technological dominance worldwide - every major tech company has their offices in the valley), that its annual contribution is probably 1-3 trillion USD/year. I'd ask someone to verify these numbers. It would also disrupt every organisation in the US - not just the tech companies but all companies that rely on those tech companies, ie 60-90% of them! Including credit card and other payment systems. That's trillions on top of trillions lost every year. Within ten years - until rebuilt has been done - you could look at 50-100trillion cost. That's $50,000,000,000,000.
You could nuke the entire country of North Korea a hundred times over and wait for the same ten years and it wouldn't even come close.
The world would immediately change. Russia, Iran and China would exploit the power vacuum. Europe without the US as trading, technology and knowledge exchange partner and military partner would get crushed. China would dominate this and next century. Terrorism, without American global firepower holding it down, would spread like never before.
This all hinges on pundits saying and calculating that
1. China is on our side
2. Kim Jong Un isn't mad
3. China and north Korea couldn't possibly work together (despite we have seen facts that they do).
If those pundits are wrong about just one of those items, it'll be a different life for all of us.
And that's not even including changes in behaviour in case of accidental war, or pushing-over-the-edge scenarios (in which one of the above beneficiaries pushes either north Korea, china or the US over the edge to provoke a war)
There are trillions and trillions of dollars and a change to the world order up for grabs at the moment, and I wonder what Xi,Putin,Un and the Ayatollahs must think right now.
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