edelsont | Entries tagged with north korea

I ended my previous journal entry by posing an apparent dilemma: the American people might want to voice their opinions on President Trump's plans with regard to North Korea, but are inhibited from doing so by the fact that we don't know what those plans are. I refer specifically to his plans about attacking North Korea with lots of nuclear weapons: has he already decided to do this? If not, what sort of "provocation" from the North Koreans would lead him to do it?

What a mess. It does seem -- doesn't it? -- that, without more information, we have no opportunity to formulate a meaningful opinion, let alone to express it.

Oh, wait. I have an idea. I previously answered the predictive questions with "We just don't know, full stop"; but maybe that isn't entirely correct. As I said, I don't think that there's any basis for saying what kind of military action against North Korea we will probably get, if any. Nor, for that matter, even for stating the likelihood of a massive nuclear attack in terms of a numerical probability. But ....

Maybe what Trump previously said, and what we think he meant, is not, after all, entirely irrelevant in this context. Suppose that I am right in my conclusion about that; suppose, at the very least, that Mr. Trump knows, by now, that many people think he was talking about dropping lots of nuclear bombs. And further suppose, since he hasn't issued a clarification, that he doesn't mind having a great many people thinking that. Does that really tell us nothing whatever about what he might actually do?

Now that I come to think of it, no. It does tell us something: not something that can usefully be expressed as a numerical probability, but something about how we ought to act in the face of our present uncertainty. Namely, that we ought not entirely to ignore the possibility of a massive nuclear attack; that we would not be wasting our time in expressing our views as to whether that would be a good thing.

And so I shall: it would be a very bad thing. (No surprise there: I've previously stated this view.)

But, you might think, it is indeed a waste of time to express that opinion. Not because the possibility is negligible that Trump would take such action ... but because there's nothing we can do about it. He is, after all, the president; under current law, he is clearly empowered to order a massive nuclear attack. We can protest all we want; he can ignore us. And let's further suppose, if only "for the sake of the argument," that he almost certainly will.

Did you notice the phrase, "under current law"? That, dear reader, is the key; it is the reason why, even under these pessimistic assumptions, we need not count ourselves powerless. We can ask Congress to change the law. And, whatever you may think of the chances that they will do so, I submit that the stakes are high enough that it is certainly worthwhile to attempt it.

Okay, let's further suppose that we're all agreed that Congress should change the law. But change it to what? It turns out that several bills on the subject have already been introduced in this Congress; they seem to fall into two groups.

The first group is procedural in nature. They say that the decision to launch a nuclear strike should not be in the hands of the President alone: that, for example, the concurrence of the Secretery of Defense and/or Secretery of State should be required.

The second group of bills does not address the "who," that is, which officials need to assent to a strike. Instead, it focuses more directly on the "what." These bills say: the President may not order a "first strike": that is, may not order a nuclear strike except in response to a prior nuclear strike by a hostile power. Or rather, that the President may not do so unless Congress has declared war.

Both types of proposals have some merit; either would be preferable to what we have now. But I prefer the second approach, a straightforward limit on what may be done: no first use.

In so saying, I reveal that, for me, this isn't just about Donald Trump. His loose talk, and indications of his mental instability, have done a lot to bring the issue to our attention. But now that it has come to our attention, I realize that I already had a clear conviction about this. I believe that our nuclear weapons have no legitimate purpose other than deterring others from attacking us with the same sort of weapons. I would prefer to live in a world in which no other use for them is even considered.

And it is, indeed, a matter of choosing the sort of world in which we prefer to live. There is no way to prove, purely by facts and reason, what the right choice is.

Now let's assume, just for a bit, that we're all agreed on this, too: we favor a "no first use of nuclear weapons" law. I just want to mention that, even within this space, there are details to be worked out as to what the law should say. I already gave a slightly expanded gloss of what "no first use" means to me: that, absent a declaration of war by Congress, the President "may not order a nuclear strike except in response to a prior nuclear strike by a hostile power." But this still leaves open lots of questions; a few of them follow, but it isn't a complete list.

What is a "hostile power"? Does it need to be a nation? If not, I think that presents a difficulty with the "declaration of war" part: it is my impression that, as a matter of international law, war can be declared only against a recognized nation-state.

Perhaps, then, "declaration of war", in our proposed "no first use" law, should be changed to some other form of Congressional authorization. There might be other reasons for this, too. In fact, this opens the way for a sort of compromise: the more open-ended the language used to describe the required sort of Congressional authorization, the more you are still preserving, even under the new law, some potential flexibility for the executive.

Similarly, how much effective flexibility you are leaving to the executive also depends on how the law defines "in response to a prior nuclear strike." We're now talking about what the President will be authorized to do without Congressional authorization. Is retaliation allowed only after at least one warhead has actually exploded? My guess is that military leaders would advise against this. But then, how is the President to determine that a nuclear strike against us (or, of course, our allies) has already been set in motion? Should the law spell out what kind of evidence to that effect the President is required to have, in order legally to order a counterattack? To this particular question, I do not propose an answer; I merely raise it.

On the other hand, I am not shy about expressing an opinion about the following: mere threats of a nuclear strike against us are not enough to justify a nuclear strike in return. Not even if we also knew that the hostile power in question had the capability to carry out its threats. "No first use," to me, means that the United States shall not attack with nuclear weapons unless our leaders have good reason to believe that a hostile power has, at least, attempted to use them against us.

I will make one more such suggestion about the details of the hypothetical "no first use" law. Among the belligerent utterances by North Korean officials, one that stands out in the memory is the statement that they might "test" a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere, somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. (I believe that the official in question even specified that he was talking about a hydrogen bomb.)

In the above, I put "test" in quotation marks because we might not be willing to accept the description of this action as merely a test. Since the North Koreans brought this possibility up, those drafting a "no first use" law for the United States might want to consider specifying that such a detonation would constitute a "first use" within the meaning of the act: that the President would be allowed to consider it to be a nuclear attack against the United States and its allies.

It would be, in actual effect and regardless of the stated intentions, an attack against the whole world. Because, you know, of the radioactive fallout: a physical phenomenon which kills lots of people, and it is impossible to predict how many, nor where.

I am not, however, actually advocating that such language be included in the "no first use" law; I am just raising the possibility. I defer to the judgment of the members of Congress, with the advice of their staffs, on the nuts and bolts of drafting a bill. And particularly, quite importantly in an example like this one, I recognize that they have to consider what version of a bill can actually get passed.

By the same token, it is possible that a "no first use" bill could not pass, but one of the more "procedural" proposals could. If so, by all means pass that: as I already said, either kind of constraint would be preferable to the present situation, in which the law places no explicit constraint at all on the President's ability to order a nuclear strike.

And yet, I shall offer one more consideration in favor of "no first use," as opposed to a procedural measure. This argument is political, in the sense that it deals with the question of what kind of bill can get passed.

Namely: I submit that the bill's chance might very well be enhanced by the fact that its proponents can claim, truthfully, that this is not fundamentally about Donald Trump. They can say that, now that their attention has been drawn to the matter, they realize that this should have been done a long time ago. Suppose that you believe that no such law is necessary under President Trump, because he would never order a first strike anyway. You still might want to consider the possibility that some future POTUS might not be so worthy of this trust.

In other words, compared to proposals which just modify the decision procedures, "no first use" offers more cover to Republicans in Congress, and others who have reason to be concerned about the reactions of pro-Trump voters. Politically, the problem with the purely procedural ideas is that they don't support that kind of claim very well. They make it almost impossible to avoid giving the impression that what this bill is "really saying" is that we don't trust this particular President.

Of course, many of us, myself included, really don't trust him. I suppose that's the fundamental reason why I keep coming back to this point: virtually any kind of constraint on the use of nuclear weapons would be better than the current lack of constraints.

Those who really, really don't trust President Trump might be tempted to feel that there is no point in passing such a law, since Trump could ignore it. But if you're suffering under that temptation, here's something else to think about: what about the people who receive the President's order for a nuclear strike, and whose job it is to carry out that order? If an explicit "no first use" law were on the books, and President Trump (or any president) ignored that law, those people would have clear legal grounds for refusing the order. And so they would be more likely actually to refuse it.

And there I rest my case. Congress, it's time for y'all to get on with it.

Over the prior three entries, I've been talking about Donald Trump's threat to "totally destroy North Korea." When I first heard that he had said that, I simply assumed that he was referring to a large-scale nuclear attack. Then I found out that a friend understood him differently.

So I set myself a task of finding out how a wider range of people understood the same threat. I make no claim that there was anything scientific about this "research." For what it's worth, most people seemed to understand it the same way I did. Most of those people, in turn, seemed to treat the nuclear interpretation as I had originally done: as obviously correct, with no need to even think about other possibilities.

I did find a few other people who had understood him differently. They thought, like the friend mentioned earlier, that Trump was talking about a military response, but not one using nuclear weapons.

All of these people (in my absurdly small "sample") had two more things in common with each other. All of them (like me) did not want a nuclear attack. They indicated that they would not approve of a nuclear response on our part, at least not as a response to a non-nuclear provocation on the part of the North Koreans.

On the other hand, all of these same people (unlike me) generally approved of Trump's performance in office. In particular, they did not share my perception of the man as unstable, in the sense that his actions are often ruled more by the emotions of the moment than they are by reason.

I then raised the question: are these people kidding themselves? Are they irrationally holding on to their favorable view of Trump, by refusing to believe that he was making a nuclear threat, as everyone else understood him to be?

My answer to that question was "not necessarily." Alternative explanations are available. As to why their favorable overall view of Trump could not be overthrown by hearing about the "totally destroy" threat: perhaps that doesn't represent a failure of rationality on their part. It need not, because it can, instead, be explained by supposing that their belief about him is based on a different set of facts. I had already, before that fateful day at the United Nations, read a lot of things about Donald Trump that already had me doubting his stability. Perhaps they were simply not aware of those things. Perhaps, also, they knew things about Trump that I did not know, things which would tend to support a more benign picture of his character.

That's a brief summary of what I've previously written on the subject. Now, I need to repair an omission: I never explicitly said whether I, after all this study of other people's thought processes, had undergone any change of my own opinion about what Trump meant by that phrase.

The short answer to that one is: not much. My original opinion was that he was talking about a massive nuclear attack. My revised opinion is that he was probably talking about a massive nuclear attack. Or, at the least, that he was willing to give that impression. I'm almost sure about that much. (And even if I'm wrong -- if he wasn't even aware that people would understand it that way -- then surely he knows by now that many did, in fact, understand it that way.)

Now let's switch over to talking about what President Trump actually will do. Is there a nuclear war in our future?

I already called your attention, two entries ago, to the fact that that is a separate question. I could have added then, but didn't, that it is a question of more direct concern. Of overwhelming concern, maybe even.

It's a momentous question, which makes it regrettable that we don't know the answer. In fact, on this question, I don't see any basis for offering even a "probable" answer, let alone an "almost certain" one. We just don't know, full stop.

In fact, our state of ignorance is even greater than that, because "what Trump will do" (or, "Will he order a massive nuclear attack?") is not one question, but many. I will cite just a few of the many forms it might take.

Has he already decided on such an attack, so that he knows (but we don't) that it's just a matter of time?

Now suppose that's not true: that he will unleash the nukes only in response to some further provocation by North Korea. If so, what sort of provocation would it take? Would he rain fire and fury on them in response to ...

... another nuclear test?

... another test of a long-range missile?

... their firing an anti-aircraft weapon at one of our planes?

... some North Korean infantryman accidentally firing his rifle, which just happens to be pointed across the Demilitarized Zone?

And if any of those things happens, is it already predetermined what President Trump's response will be? Or might that also be influenced by logically extraneous factors, like what the mayor of San Juan had said about him the previous day?

We don't know the answer to any of those questions, either.

Which is kind of too bad, because we, as American citizens, might want to say something about the prospect with which we are faced -- if only we knew what it was. During this "calm before the storm" (an even more recent quote from our presumpident), if we knew what kind of storm he was promising us, we might wish to express how we felt about it.

But don't worry! In my next journal entry, I shall come to the rescue. I will explain one weird trick which will allow us to escape from our paralysis, despite the fog of ignorance in which we are being kept.

In my last journal entry, I told you what various sorts of people thought President Trump meant by the phase "totally destroy North Korea." Then I raised a question as to "what it all meant." (The question itself wasn't very specific. I had in mind something like this: from perusing this "data set" about people's interpretations, what -- if anything -- can we learn about how people's minds work, when they think about politics, in general?)

And then I offered an answer to that question ... though I told you at the time that it wasn't an answer that I actually believed. In summary, that answer (and my supposed justification for it) was:

different groups of Trump supporters believed different things about what he meant;
but the groups had something in common: what each group believed (about what Trump meant) matched up with what that same group would want him to do;
so -- since the two groups couldn't both be right about what he meant -- they were not being honest with themselves.

So now, my job is to tell you why I don't really think that.

Even if that argument did support the conclusion that some people were not being honest with themselves, it would certainly not support the conclusion that all of the Trump supporters were guilty of that. At the very least, it would leave open the possibility that some of them were, and some of them weren't.

Here's an example. You will recall that my own original interpretation of Trump's phrase was: the United States would, " ... if forced to defend itself and its allies ...", drop lots of nuclear bombs on North Korea. Or, as I later crudely put it, would "nuke the NoKies until they glow." So now -- just supposing that we still consider that to be the correct interpretation -- what would follow from that?

Well ... you may also recall that one group of Trump supporters (namely, most of the people leaving comments on Breitbart News) interpreted those words of his in exactly the same way that I did. So were those people failing to be honest with themselves? Meaning that I believed something because the evidence supported it, while they believed the same thing for a completely different reason, namely, because they wanted to believe it?

That could be so. But "could be" isn't good enough here. The more appropriate question is: would I have rational justification for claiming, on the basis of what we've seen, that this (I and they believing the same thing, but for a completely different reason) actually is the case?

I think not. I think it would be more plausible (and more fair-minded) to suppose that, if I have good reasons for believing something, and they believe the same thing, then they believe it for good reasons as well.

I do recall that there's one important difference between me and that group of people: while we both think that Trump (was saying that he) would drop a lot of nuclear bombs on North Korea, they also approve of his doing so. And I don't; I find the prospect utterly abhorrent.

But, for present purposes, so what? So their value judgment is wrong (in my eyes). Does it necessarily follow, even from my perspective, that they cannot be rational about a related, but still distinct, matter, namely, about what their president means by what he says? I don't see why.

If I'm right about that, then we're left, at most, with this: the other group of Trump supporters are not being honest with themselves. That would be the group who have a different belief as to what Trump was talking about; they believe that he was threatening, at most, some form of military action with more limited goals, and less devastating effects. Like "mere" regime change, for instance.

So let's look a little more at that group of people. And let's continue, for now, simply to assume that my original understanding of what Trump meant to say (namely, that he was prepared to drop lots of nukes on the NoKies) was correct.

If my interpretation is [assumed to be] right, and they have a different interpretation, then their interpretation is wrong. That, for once, is pretty straightforward. But does it follow that they are not being honest with themselves?

Not necessarily. It doesn't even necessarily follow that they are deficient in logic. It could be (and, indeed, it seems more likely) that they reach a different conclusion because they start with different premises.

If they and I are getting news from different sources, then they and I have different sets of facts of which we are aware. This doesn't necessarily mean that they or I are victims of "fake news," believing things that are factually false (although that could also be the case). If each "side" knows things that the other simply doesn't know, then they can come to different conclusions, with each being completely rational about it.

How does that apply to the present case: to the question of what Donald Trump meant by "totally destroy North Korea"? Here's a simple example. The following are three utterances by Mr. Trump:

"The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea."
"Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime."
"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen."

Now imagine two people; call them X and Y. Both of them are aware of the first quote above. X is aware of the second quote, but Y is not. Conversely, Y is aware of the third quote, but X is not.

Other things being equal, I would expect X, who knows about " ... a suicide mission for himself and for his regime", to be more likely to think that Trump, in the "totally destroy" sentence, was talking about regime change. More likely, that is, than Y, who knows, instead, about "fire and fury."; Y would be more likely to think that Trump was talking about dropping multiple nuclear bombs.

In that example, the quotes are all real, but you might reasonably think that the suppositions about what the two people know are not realistic. You might think, in other words, that almost anyone who was aware of the first quote would also be at least vaguely aware of both the second and third, as well.

Fair enough. But now imagine this, instead. X vividly remembers many times when Trump has seemed to threaten (or favor, or suggest) violence in various forms. Y, who gets her news from different sources, has never heard about most of those. Wouldn't you think, in this case, that X would be readier than Y to hear a great deal of violence in the words "totally destroy North Korea"? (Once again, would be readier ... other things being equal.)

That does seem like a plausible example, doesn't it? I mean, there at least could be news sources which report extensively on Trump, but which (for example) focus almost entirely on his more serious utterances on matters of policy, rather than his off-the-cuff remarks about punching protesters in the face. So someone who got her Trump news from sources like that would simply, and rationally, have a different picture of the man.

And thus, there would be no need to suppose that she was failing to be honest with herself.

And all this, mind you, is without even considering the possibility that my [original] interpretation of Trump's infamous remark might actually be ... gasp ... wrong. Please, don't get me started on that. Not today, anyway.

In parting, let me go all meta on you for a bit. What is this journal entry about? About North Korea? Donald Trump? Well, yes, both. But also ....

Even more fundamentally, I think, it's about two other things. One of them is generally referred to as "critical thinking." The other is civility in political discourse: the ability to express disagreement without impugning the motives of those with whom you disagree.

And if I had to narrow it down to just one topic, I'd go with critical thinking. I think that is the foundation which makes civil discourse possible. If that isn't obvious, consider this: your ability to do critical thinking is woefully incomplete unless it includes, in particular, the self-critical kind.

My previous post presented four possible interpretations of President Trump's phrase, "totally destroy North Korea." I refused to tell you, at the time, what I thought Trump actually did mean. But now I will tell you that.

My first reaction was that he meant that the US would physically destroy the country: kill most of the people, and/or leave the place so radioactive that nobody could live there, or something like that. In fact, at the time, that was the only interpretation that even occurred to me.

The same day, I had lunch with a friend -- let's call her A -- who understood it a different way. She thought that it was much more likely that he was talking about regime change, or re-unification of North and South Korea; still something involving military force, but a lot less of it.

Here's one of the reasons why she thought this was more plausible: Trump wouldn't kill most of the North Koreans, because he knows that such an all-out nuclear attack would harm his own people, as well as the enemy's. I took this to be based on the following: radioactive fallout doesn't stay put. The winds spread it around, and, if there's enough of it to begin with, there's likely to be a measurable increase in cancer deaths all over the world.

I agreed with the underlying point: I thought she was correct in saying that a massive nuclear attack on any one country would be likely to cause deaths in every country. But I wasn't so confident that Donald Trump knows that. And even if he does, I wasn't confident that he would remember it at the moment of decision. I see him as impulsive: prone to act, especially when angry, without thinking things through.

This woman, A, is a Trump supporter (which I, emphatically, am not). She agrees with many of his political positions, and has much more faith in his stability and rationality than I have.

So she and I agree on one thing, and disagree on another. We agree that an all-out nuclear attack would be a bad thing to do. We disagree on how likely Trump would be to do it.

(Or, more precisely, on whether, in his speech, he meant to say that he would do it. Whether he actually would do it is a separate question.)

After this conversation, I was very curious as to whether most people had understood him the way I had ... or the way she had, or what. I did a number of things to gather information on that. One of them, of course, was to post the question here on DW. But I also talked to some more people directly, and went and looked at a number of other Web sites. So what did I find?

As far as talking to people one-to-one, I have only a small sample. For what it's worth, all but one of them shared my way of understanding Trump's phrase. The one exception was another Trump supporter. Let's call him B.

I'm pretty sure that this man, like A, agreed with me that the US shouldn't launch a massive nuclear attack on North Korea. He didn't say that in so many words, though. What he did say was "I'm sure that there are lots of good people in North Korea." But that seems to me to be a pretty good indication that he didn't approve of the idea of trying to kill them all.

So this situation seems to me to be pretty much parallel to the one with A. B and I, like A and I, agree that "nuking 'em 'til they glow" would be a bad thing to do. We disagree, actually, on two things: in our general attitudes toward Trump (his favorable, mine unfavorable); and on how likely Trump would be to do this bad thing (he thought this less likely than I did).

Now let's look at the results of the other main part of my (highly unscientific) "research": looking at a bunch of Web sites.

I was about to say: most of those Web sites agreed with my reading of what Trump meant. But on second thought: I don't know that. Most of them just repeated his words, and gave no direct indication of how they understood them. So if I just assumed that they understood him the same way that I did, that would be nothing but cognitive bias on my part.

Some Web sites -- a smaller number -- did give some indication of what they thought he meant. Some of these agreed with my interpretation (my first interpretation, that is). And some of them indicated some uncertainty about Trump's specific meaning. For what it's worth, I didn't come across any that (so far as I could tell) definitely read Trump's phrase the way that A or B did: that what Trump was threatening to do was something comparatively mild, like "mere" regime change.

I'm almost finished reporting on my data (as opposed to analyzing it). I just want to mention a special subset of what I found on the Web, namely, comments that were left by readers of Breitbart News.

These people were not unanimous in their reaction to Trump's proposal to "totally destroy North Korea," but they were close. Almost all of them, like my friends A and B, made clear that they supported Trump, in this matter at least. But unlike A and B, they interpreted his remarks the same way that I originally did: as meaning that ... under vaguely specified conditions ... he would attack North Korea with multiple nuclear weapons. (One of them helpfully added, "I hope he uses really dirty bombs, too.")

So, to recap, here's the contrast between the two groups of Trump supporters within my overall "sample." For the two people I talked to in person:

they like Trump;
they don't like the idea of his nuking the NoKies until they glow;
and they don't think Trump was saying that he would do that.

For (most of) the Breitbart commenters:

they like Trump;
they do like the idea of nuking the NoKies until they glow;
and they do think that Trump was saying that he would do that.

Now contrast that with where I stand on those same three points:

I don't like Trump;
I don't like the idea of his nuking the NoKies until they glow;
and I do think that Trump was saying that he would do that.

Now what about all the other people who, like me, don't approve of Donald Trump? Unfortunately, I don't have much data at all, on them. Or rather, I don't have the kind of data which I would need, for my purposes. I would need to know all three things:

That they don't like Trump (which is given by how I defined the group); and
whether they would approve of his nuking the NoKies; and, independently of that,
whether they think that he was threatening to do so.

As I said, there are very few people, among the Trump non-supporters, for whom I have actual evidence on all three points. For what little it's worth, for the few people for whom I do, they all seem to agree with my own take on the situation: they don't think he should go the big nuclear route, and they do think he is threatening to do so.

Okay. That's it for data; it's time for me to tell you what I think it all means. But -- surprise! -- I'm not going to do much of that; not in this post, at least. That's partly because this post is already pretty long; it's also because I like leaving people in suspense.

There's only one thing that I do want to give you, in the way of analysis, right now. And that one thing is a straw man: an analysis that you might expect me to believe in, but which I actually don't.

Namely: the Trump supporters are not being honest with themselves. The consistency between the two groups of Trump supporters is this: whatever they think Trump should do (nuke the NoKies, for one group, and not nuke them, for the other group) ... that is also what they they think he will do. (Or, more precisely, what they think he meant to say he would do.)

The two groups can't both be right about what he meant. So we conclude that, whatever they think about what he meant, that doesn't come from any actual evidence. It comes, instead, from this: because they like him, they let themselves assume that what he meant is the same as what they would want him to mean.

Given the data ... and given that I, myself, am strongly anti-Trump ... it would be natural to think that this is the conclusion I would draw.

It would be natural to think it, but it would be wrong.

This morning, in his address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump said this:

The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.

I just want to ask one question: what did he mean by the phrase "totally destroy North Korea"?

You see, when I first read it, I thought it was obvious what that meant. And then I talked to a friend, who interpreted it rather differently.

So what do you think he meant? I will list four possibilities, but perhaps your own view doesn't match any of them. In any case, I'd like to hear it.

The possibilities I've thought of so far:

Destroy the current North Korean regime: put Kim Jong-Un out of power. (Interpret this to mean that Mr. Trump wasn't being specific about what regime would follow it.)

Destroy the current North Korean state, by reuniting Korea under what is currently the South Korean regime.

Destroy the military capabilities of North Korea.

Destroy the country physically, meaning something like: kill a large fraction of the people, and perhaps render the territory now known as "North Korea" uninhabitable for several years.

I suppose you'd like to know what my original interpretation was. But I'd rather not tell you that ... yet. I don't want that to influence your answer.

Bonus: here's an alternate version of the question. Would "totally destroying" North Korea, as Donald Trump meant that phrase to be understood, involve the use of nuclear weapons?

I invite your reply in the comments. If you are logged in to Dreamwidth, then your comment will become visible as soon as you enter it. If you are not logged in, you can still comment, but your comment won't be visible (to anyone but me) until I "screen" it.