Would you be at all surprised if North Korea launched a nuclear attack on Seoul or Tokyo tomorrow? I wouldn’t be. I would have been a few years ago.

China continues to flex its muscles in the Pacific, its technical capabilities continue to expand (making its military ever-bolder) and it’s not difficult to imagine a situation escalating out of control. Not true even a few years ago.

And we’re really not far away from Iran (probably) having a bomb of its own, which it will use to threaten Israel — and us, if they can figure out a delivery system.

This isn’t really President Trump’s fault (although his erratic behavior concerns me, he seems to listen to his generals), but global diplomacy has changed a lot since 2012, and not for the better.

You sure about that? It sounded silly when I first heard about this freak out, and only more so as time goes on.

I did a real large and obvious all-caps comment on the FB posting of your Alfie essay, since that’s where the most debate was happening to let people know it was an autopost and to head over to your blog. It does not say anything obvious — just in small grey lettering “WordPress” under the time-stamp on the post, so if you don’t know to look for that, it looks like you posted it.

Woohoo Protoss!! I too tend to over-build and turret-turtle. I also over-research, then end up with only a handful of super-beefy units who then die to a massive hoard of low researched mass units like a Terrain bio-ball or Zerg swarm 😛

I’m thinking China would follow through on the treaty — they are pretty big about the concepts of ‘honor’ and ‘saving-face’ over there. Not to mention they seek stability above all else, and really really really don’t want a flood of NK refugees streaming over their border which would put a huge strain on the social services and national stability. But they also don’t want to be blasted off the earth. But they may figure they’ve got over a billion people, and can stand to lose a few million and still be able to bounce back, especially with the large western and northern lands that have little population (and are much less a target for nukes) and would be upwind from radioactive fallout of the major cities of their east-coast. So who knows!

Miss u too! Tell anybody commenting on FB to come over here, would you? I’ll miss them otherwise, but I’ll bet the WordPress autoposter doesn’t say anything obvious to make clear that it’s an autopost and that my friends are therefore commenting in the usual fashion.

Protoss are the best, so you’re correct. Although usually as Protoss my paranoid turret turtling is sufficient to ensure that no Ghosts get anywhere close to my base’s interior.

Then I lose for spending too much money on turrets. But at least I don’t get nuked!

I definitely agree China would retaliate in a first strike against China. But — and maybe I’m wrong about this — I don’t see them treating the Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty of 1961 the way we treat NATO or the Soviet Union treated the Warsaw Pact. Especially not with the way NoKo has been behaving lately. China doesn’t want its buffer state to collapse, but it *also* doesn’t want to be wiped off the map in nuclear fire, which is exactly what would happen if they fired ICBMs at the United States.

Thanks for posting! I’ve missed sharing and chatting with you!

Ah, totally understand. Although if it was a first strike, (even from subs) China would likely retaliate with ICBM’s. Even if it wasn’t, it could still cause unnecessary panic in the Chinese-Octogon (we have a Pentagon — I dunno what they have lol) and bring us dangerously close to them launching on us.

I’m almost always Protoss, so I usually just try to evacuate the army and get the probs huddled in a far corner away from the mineral line and base buildings 😛 Definitely makes the heart beat race what-ever race you play as when you hear that sound-bite! 😉

Thanks for adding!

My basic reason for not going into various escalation scenarios surrounding North Korea is that it would have made a 3,000-word article about not being stupid during a nuclear attack (from whatever source) into a 15,000-word article about likely and less-likely nuclear attack scenarios in the coming years.

It is certainly still possible that a major, apocalyptic nuclear exchange could happen between Great Powers with lots of ICBMs (and I do count China as a Great Power). It just seems much less likely than it did during the Cold War, and also seems much less likely than a (devastating but essentially survivable) small-scale nuclear exchange involving a regional power. And, since you won’t know when the air raid sirens go off which kind of war is being fought, we should always *assume* that it’s a small-scale war rather than a Dr. Strangelove world-ender.

The particular scenario you sketch out here, where the U.S. launches a massive ICBM-based attack against a rogue state (even given the unlikely “glass NoKo” order, wouldn’t we just use our nuclear submarines, so China would be less likely to perceive an attack? NoKo isn’t that big, and can’t shoot back), and then China and/or Russia make a first-strike attack on the United States basically because they’re twitchy (don’t they both have second-strike capability anyway?) strikes me as particularly unlikely, but, either way, it’s beyond the scope of the article. I’m ambitious but not that ambitious!

>What happens when you hear the phrase “Nuclear launch detected”?

Evacuate my core base of units (and buildings, if I’m Terran), do a quick detector sweep to see if I can find the stupid Ghost who did it, and then — generally — wait and see where the dang thing lands before I retaliate. What do you do?

One time I did find myself in a use-em-or-lose-em situation, and, I confess, I did launch my nukes randomly at somebody whom I’d been planning to attack anyway, figuring the worst that could happen is no harm done and the best-case outcome is I get a new resource base and knock my neighbor out of the game.

Furthermore, even if NK starts it, and China chooses to sit out, there is still the strong likely hood that China and/or Russia could see inbound ICBM’s, and rather than wait to see if its target is NK, they could panic (ever play Star Craft? What happens when you hear the phrase “Nuclear launch detected”? Now imagine you can actually see the missiles on the radar arching towards your country….), and counter-launch on the US, starting WWIII. International crisis can be fast moving, and especially with the current President on the nuke-button, the US may not have the time (or inclination) to give Russia/China a heads up that we are launching on NK and not their respective countries.Especially if the President (who has broken so many norms already, so why not one more) decides to do a pre-preemptive nuclear strike on NK and glass the place to ‘win’ the Korean War.