North Korea has been in the news a lot in recent months, and even by North Korea's standards, it's starting to get pretty bleak. Youtuber Philip DeFranco described Kim Jong Un and his nation as "a baby with a hand grenade", which is a pretty apt analogy. However, like all babies, North Korea has grown and matured, and that baby has gotten a lot better at throwing that hand grenade.
As the nation continues its nuclear weapons development, it's becoming more and more clear that this is an issue that we will eventually have to deal with, but what will that look like?
According to an assessment by the Pentagon, the only way to destroy North Korea's nuclear weapons would be a ground invasion. This certainly isn't a situation the American public would welcome, as young men going to a faraway land to kill and be killed is never a welcome proposition. For those who believe that taking down a tiny, impoverished country like North Korea would be easy, you would be sadly mistaken.
According to a comparison done by armedforces.edu, North Korea spends over twenty percent of its GDP on its military, compared to America's 3.8 percent. They also have 1.19 million active service members, compared to the USA's 1.3 million. North Korea may have fewer tanks and armored vehicles than us, but they have about four times as much total artillery. All of this, simply put, means that a war with North Korea would cost at lease thousands of American soldiers their lives, and perhaps many more.
However, I haven't even taken into account North Korea's nuclear capabilities. Unlike the U.S and their allies, North Korea has no reservations about using their weapons of mass destruction and it may even be a necessary military strategy for them. North Korea simply does not have the economic might to sustain a war with the richest country in the world, and Kim Jong Un knows that.
This means that a nuclear deterrent would most likely be used earlier in the conflict than later. North Korea's nuclear program is no longer a question of when; they already have what they need to make a functioning nuclear missile. In fact, they already have the capability to hit the mainland of the United States.
The issue of North Korea is something that will almost definitely be resolved in the next ten years, one way or another, but the public discussion is way behind right now. People still seem to have this belief that North Korea is not a threat, thousands of miles away, and led by a funny fat man who occasionally does things.
The truth of the matter is, however, that the threat of a nuclear attack is very real, and now that we have a president who is also a funny man who likes to start things, the world is in for the biggest game of chicken that it has ever bore witness to. A conflict with North Korea is inevitable, and as much as it may hurt, lives will almost certainly be lost in this conflict, but the sooner we understand the severity of the threat, the sooner we can mount a course of action that can, hopefully, lead to the least destructive outcome possible.