Kim Jong-Trump, or how people can talk themselves into launching a ‘pre-emptive’ or ‘preventive’ nuclear attack

We are entering a particularly dangerous phase of the process, not least because the other two major nuclear powers in the world, China and Russia, both have land borders with North Korea. And neither of them loves or trusts the United States.

U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong-un. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson briefly said that the U.S. was not seeking to change the North Korean regime last week, although he was almost immediately contradicted by President Trump. In the long run, however, that is the unpalatable but acceptable way out of this crisis. In fact, there is no other way out.Photographs courtesy of Flickr and Wikimedia Commons

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

August 14, 2017

LONDON, U.K.—“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 U.S. president to carry out a nuclear first strike, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film

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