Is that due to fear of an atomic bomb or more because of the artillery pieces aimed at Seoul as well as surrounding countries being unwilling to take in large amounts of North Korean refugees?

The Kim clan is definitely doing ok, could you present the argument for the rest of the population?

The regime in NK persists because a great power (namely, Beijing) does not want an ally of the West on its border and is willing to spend the lives of 100s of 1000s of its soldiers to prevent that from happening (as illustrated by Beijing's choices during the Korean War).

Iraq, Libya or Lebanon don't have that advantage (and Kiev would get that advantage only if switches to being pro-Russian).

> One can argue they are faring better than Iraq, Libya, Ukraine or Lebanon

How? Are you saying the median person in any of those making an informed decision would swap places with a random person in North Korea?

Tiny nitpick: the family name is "Kim", Jong Un is his first name. Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Il, Kim Il Sung.

Not substantially. The fallout produced would obviously be substantially larger than any one nuclear explosion, but it's still a small amount on a planetary scale. If you naively scaled up the contamination area of the castle bravo test from 15 Mt to 15 Gt, it would be 3% of earth's surface area. Further, the range that fallout can travel is limited by the half lives of the particles, not the size of the explosions, so it does not scale like this.

We also have experience with large amounts of fallout released into the atmosphere. For comparison, in a 12 month period from 1961 to 1962 there were 340 Megatons worth of nukes detonated in atmosphere. While I would recommend against detonating a few times that much all at once, it's a few percent increase in global cancer rates scenario, not a nuclear hellscape scenario.

> it didn't blanket the world in fallout, which matters

Fires, not fallout. Volcanoes don't spark continent-wide fires. Sundial would. That sooty matter lofted into the stratosphere is what makes it unique from a volcano. Not the radioactivity.

> I would call the gigaton bomb a self destroying auto immune disease

We had Project Sundial levels of nuclear weapons on Earth during the Cold War. The only difference in consolidating it into a single weapon is fault tolerance.

Essentially all of those are true already, mostly through the military and police, and mostly through Dead hand guarantees.

If you destroy a city, shoot up a school, kill a family, or kill an individual, someone with weapons will likely come to retaliate even if your victim is dead

Defenselessness is a unstable solution. It only takes one person out of 7 billion to defect.

You would have to simultaneously train every child to be a pacifist, and do it with 100% success rate

I suppose the reasoning is that intelligent aliens perhaps would actually think that it was a good accomplishment, given that they know of much bigger wars that involve multiple planets and perhaps themselves have bombs that are capable of destroying entire planets? There's no way to know if extremely intelligent aliens would actually be peaceful or extreme beligerent dickheads. I don't think we have any evidence of a successful species even on Earth that behaves like peace-loving hippies.

I don't mind paying a little more for my eggs, personally, if I get to enjoy living in an actual civilization as a bonus.

> Russians now pay a third or less what you are probably currently paying for eggs

Now do it as a fraction of real disposable income.

(You're not wrong. American eggs are pricey [1]. But they'll always be pricey relative to Russia's simply because the dollar is strong.)

[1] https://www.globalproductprices.com/rankings/egg_prices/

They were being imported and paid for. It's funny that this is being considered as "help".

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Leaving same weapons just on time totaly aside: when Prigozhin started march to Moscow, and roads were dug - US called kremlin to assure "we have nothing in common, stay strong Vlad". Just imagine what if words "If Prigozhin will become leader we will speak with him" came from the White House...

As Prighozin's escapade and surprising support from most of russian troops showed it may not require much, rather the right dose at right moment at right place.

Absolutely nobody is happy about the war in russia, from the very bottom all the way to the top. So nobody really knows how far the theoretical tipping point is, of course oligarchs with dictator promptly kill any emerging threat.

Full support, i.e. actually throwing everything that Ukraine is asking for. If Russia is resoundingly pushed out of Ukraine, such that they cannot claim any victory at all, it may threaten the stability of Putin's power, given how much he's staked on success with the invasion.

How likely this is depends on who you ask, but the US seems to be trying to trying to avoid taking any risks at all there.

Because if he was, why not do it now? If your plan is to burn your country and the world to the ground, then there's not much reason to delay.

Putin is saving his own life first and foremost with his actions, so he's not suicidal. But then secondly if you listen to the man it's apparent he believes he's rebuilding the Soviet Union as he imagined it when he was stationed in Berlin as a young KGB officer, and that belief is powered by a very specific lens he casts over Russian history.

Which is to say: he doesn't want to destroy the empire he see's as his legacy (which is notably different to whether he actually cares at all about the Russian people in it - the Russian government historically does not overly concern itself with dead Russians unless politically convenient to).

EDIT: The third element of course is that there's not literally "a button". No leader has unilateral release control of strategic nuclear weapons, so the reality is one "mad man" can't fire them - orders have to be issued, codes input etc. If Russia was going to launch it's ICBMs, then you can't do it by waking up in a bad mood one day unless at least a few of your top generals agree with you.

His daugther?

I've first read about Putin having a terminal stage of cancer in 2004 (that's not a joke). Since then I clearly recall him getting sick with some other kinds of cancer at least 3 other times.

Aren't you (yet) tired of dreaming about this?

Clausewitz said it best - war is just politics executed with other means.

War starts when the cost/benefit analysis of violent means comes up better than the alternative (peaceful) means. War ends when the opposite happens, and the cost/benefit of the continuation of violence starts to come down in comparison with peace.

The benefit component is for the most part a zero-sum game (fixed land area), while the cost component is variable and growing with time. One way to force peace is to impose great costs on one or both warring sides.

>War's ultimate purpose is to shift the situation into a point where diplomacy can happen.

Sorry but that is just plain nonsense. The purpose of diplomacy is to avoid war. War destroys any reason for diplomacy.

> See Ukraine, everyone who is anyone tried to prevent the war

Another rumour is that a peace deal of some sort deal was available to Ukraine but "the West" advised otherwise.

Who knows what the truth of the matter is, but what can be known is that we don't know, although that requires certain skills and some conscious effort, which seems to be a bit much to ask of people when the war drums are banging (state propaganda, 2nd order citizen propaganda like on HN, etc).

War is the end of diplomacy. Name a single effective Western diplomat capable of preventing wars?