North Korea. A way out.

It seems that President Trump is doing all he can to push the volatile North Korean leadership over the edge so that we can retaliate and “bomb the hell out of them.”

Fortunately, I doubt that he’ll order a first strike as our ~40,000 US soldiers are on the North Korean southern border and many will likely die from pushing North Korea a little too far.

I would not be surprised to find that some of North Korea’s nuclear weapons are in tunnels under the DMZ or further into South Korea!

And few mention the North Korean’s submarines that have ballistic missile capability. They may not be able to fire them far away from their targets, but submarines can get close to coast lines… close enough.

But push, President Trump does, rather than negotiate. At least, that’s his method today. Tomorrow it may change.

A few years ago, I started to wonder how we could resolve the “North Korean threat” and realized that the reason that they are developing nuclear and other weapons as fast as they can is the same reason that we got into an arms race with the Soviet Union.

Back in the Cold War days, both sides feared the other side, and thought that the only way to stop being attacked was using the M.A.D. philosophy. That’s the acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction. The concept was that the Russians would destroy us but we would destroy them as well so neither side wins. We just destroy each other.

Of course, the arms manufacturers win, assuming that nothing actually happens, as they get paid huge sums to develop and manufacture all of the the weapons using government money to pay for it all, increasing our national debt.

North Korea is fearful that some American president would want to finish the quiescent war once and for all, so spend huge amounts of their annual budgets on weapons. Imagine that… they are paranoid. Both Koreas lost a huge percentage of their populations to this conflict.

Neither side has  forgotten.

So in 2013, I wrote to the North Korean ambassador in New York while I was a congressional candidate hoping to visit North Korea and find how both countries could work together rather than just shouting threats.

At this time, neither country ever talked to each other, other than hurling threats over the media. That’s not a way to settle differences.

I proposed that if North Korea would give up its nuclear weapons, the U.S. could flood North Korea with money and help make it prosperous. In that way, Kim Jong Un could become a hero to his citizens and not just feared, and South and North Korea could discuss a peaceful merger to become one Korea, something similar to east and west Germany.

The North Koreans would have access to South Korean electronics and consumer toys and the South Koreans would get access to cheap North Korean labor.

Even the Chinese figured this out by shipping textiles over the Yalu river to North Korea, that manufacture clothes with “Made in China” labels with the Chinese selling them to us.

Watch this BBC report, dated 9/12/17

I thought that it would be far less expensive to flood North Korea with money and prosperity in exchange for removal of their nuclear weapons, that bleed us and them in the never ending very expensive arms race.

We don’t trust them and they don’t trust us.

Sadly, I didn’t hear from the UN ambassador and that was that. Perhaps the FBI intercepted the envelope and it was never delivered?

I think that I would have risked prison in an effort to save many of our soldiers from certain death in the event of a conflict, something that our administration appears to be wanting.

If we get into a shooting war, it’s going to be very ugly and possibly similar to the “slam dunk” in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we’ve been slam dunking for about fifteen years without quite getting to the dunk.

We need to do something different other than knocking our heads against a brick wall and wondering why we have a perpetual headache.