In the first two hours, NK artillery can be seriously troublesome on Seoul. But after several sorties of USAF, the NK artillery should quieten down. Let's give them two days at most to rain down whatever they have before getting blown up from the air bombing. It would be suicidal for NK to use any kinds of WMDs, pure suicide!! After the artillery, only other arsenal NK is individual soldiers, some of whom might be special forces skill grade, causing damage and chaos in SK. Any armor movement into SK would be "very difficult" given USAF will have total air superiority, although some penetrations can be achieved, but do not forget that SK military will not be sleeping and might capture more of NK territory right upfront. Now why would little Kim be such an idiot to do what he has been doing in last two weeks. No power will come to his help including China. Kid should quieten down and play some video games to supress the adrenalin rush.
Fine like there were before? My friend always made good money working for Dupont in Frankfurt before and after. Siemens certainly existed before the wall, during the wall, and still there. Your have a point they grew and became an even greater mfg. country.
This is generally thought to be the case by most U.S. citizens that remember the war, but I don't think it is an accurate recollection. It is understandable, however, why U.S. citizens might not have an accurate view of the war effort. They were lied to about almost everything. We dropped tons of agent orange herbicide contaminated with a dioxin, extremely toxic to mammals. We slaughtered villagers, destroyed their crops, burned there homes, killed their animals. Dropped cluster bombs and napalm. Bombed Haiphong, and bombed Hanoi with wave after wave of B-52's --quite a few were shot down. We sent troops into both Cambodia and Laos and lied about it. (We lied about nearly everything, including the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" that we invented as an excuse to go into Vietnam after the French were defeated. The attraction for us, just as it was for the French and the Japanese, was the abundant natural resources of Indochina-- oil, tin,other minerals, and agriculture.) We massively bombed Cambodia in 1969-70, and lied about it. For the size of Vietnam we had a tremendous troop presence -- over a half million troops. We killed a million Vietnamese --the CIA alone executed over 25,000 civilians in South Vietnam. About the only thing we did not do is nuke them. In 1971 alone we dropped 800,000 tons of bombs on not just Vietnam, but also on Cambodia and Laos. In Laos the CIA installed another puppet government. In five years we flew 25,000 attack sorties over just the Plain of Jars in Cambodia and dropped 75,000 tons of bombs. There, we leveled everything above ground and killed or wounded thousands. By the end of the war we had dropped 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam. This is about 500lbs for every Vietnamese inhabitant and more than twice what was dropped on Europe and Japan combined in world war II!. . No, don't think our actions in Vietnam could be properly described as "[fighting] with one had tied behind the back."
The last time the USAF entered NK airspace to attack, China got nervous and poured a million troops over the border. The result is the DMZ zone.
Vietnam was lost, but we really didn't lose. We gave it away for a variety of reasons. One thing about the ARVN. They don't get the credit they deserve. Some stat's. There are many loudly touted, absurd misperceptions about both the willingness and the ability of the South Vietnamese to fight. Between January 1965 and October 1972, the South Vietnamese Army lost 183,528 killed and another 499,026 wounded. Simply stated, during the period when the United States lost roughly 58,000 men, the South Vietnamese suffered 183,000+ battle deaths. This, out of a population base averaging fewer than 16,000,000, which is less than 10% of the average US population during that period. If America had bled its population at the same rate South Vietnam bled its population, America would have to have sustained 271,000 battle deaths and 730,000+ wounded every year for the entire seven year period that US combat troops were committed in Vietnam. That would have meant 1,875,000 American dead in Vietnam, along with 5,122,000 wounded. This is one of the better websites if you care you educate yourselves on what actually happened. Several articles on the main page as well. http://vnafmamn.com/VietnamWar_facts.html A good article on TET and the media distortion of the actual facts. http://vnafmamn.com/legacy-of-tet.html The facts: In the early morning hours of 1 Feb 68, communist sappers blew a small hole in the outer wall of the US Embassy in Saigon, entered the embassy grounds and engaged in a brief firefight with embassy guards. They never entered the embassy, and all were doomed. Later, an investigation revealed that these sappers had no mission other than to enter the embassy grounds and make a psychological gesture for the benefit of American television. It was a suicide mission aimed at the American psyche. It was a total success. Astounded viewers back in America were being told that the Communist had captured the US Embassy in Saigon. This was a false report, and it mattered not that this false report was later corrected. In the words of General Dave Palmer, though the communists were to suffer "...thirty thousand dead in the first ten days of the Tet offensiveânone would achieve as much as the twenty who blew a hole in the embassy wall and survived inside for four hours." As one US observer noted "The Americans might not understand the power of television propaganda, but the enemy sure as hell did." Peter Arnett[also filed the infamous report supposedly quoting the US officer in the Mekong Delta as saying "We had to destroy the town in order to save it." This was another sensational fabrication. The full story of Arnett's deceptive reporting of this incident is covered in depth by B. G. Burkett in his book Stolen Valor.
NK is not likely to attack since they are pussies and its just internal politics, not external!!! On the other hand, human stupidity is infinite. I'd say if few millions of n.koreans would be dead, perhaps it may be a lesson for other nations to never give power to such sociopaths. Well, nah, i doubt humans will ever learn that, unless visited by aliens.
Lucrum, Kerry is in my personal opinion among the most qualified statesman we have ever had at the State department. He is the son of a foreign service officer, educated at St. Paul's (you can't do better than that!) and Yale. He was an outstanding debater at both. He's had a deep interest in foreign affairs since childhood. One of his roommates at Yale was Harvey Bundy, McGeorge Bundy's nephew --recall the latter Bundy, along with his brother William were chief architects of the U.S.Vietnam policy. (Kerry has said that that relationship greatly influenced his decision to fight in Vietnam.) Kerry later had some harsh words for McGeorge Bundy, and of course became a critic of U.S. policy there. Kerry has an outstanding grasp of history, is multilingual and lived and went to school abroad during the Marshal Plan years -- Germany, Switzerland, Norway. Of course he understands politics forward and backwards and has been directly involved in politics nearly all his adult life. He was Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 2009 until appointed Secretary of State. Though he is from an upper middle class family, not wealthy, he is patrician through and through, as will be the majority of the diplomats and world leaders he will negotiate with. We need a highly polished, well-mannered person in that job, because that's important in winning the respect of the people he will be dealing with. Berlesconi types are seen by these folks as buffoons, and get no respect. I doubt seriously that the U.S. has ever in its history had a more qualified Statesman in its service than John Kerry, and that would include Ben Franklin. Oh, and I must mention his most important qualification. He is a former hockey player.