What is happening with the recent nuclear escalations?
As tensions rise between the United States and North Korea, and the threat of nuclear attack grows, everyone is asking themselves one question: WTF is happening!!?
Donald Trump's warning of "fire and fury," come in response to North Korea's threats to attack Guam with a nuclear-tipped missile. Great... Kim Jong-Il and Donald Trump are in a nuclear stand-off. That’s terrifying.
According to a new poll, 75 percent of Americans also see North Korea as an imminent threat to the United States. But how scared should we actually be of North Korea? Firstly, the likelihood of North Korea successfully hitting the mainland US is slim.
For North Korea to even hit the West Coast of the United States, they would have to use an Intercontinental ballistic missile. That ICBM would have to fly in an arc, up and out of the Earth's atmosphere. The missile would have to survive the heat from re-entering the atmosphere, or else it would break apart. Also, there's a LOT of distance between Pyongyang and San Francisco. 5,600 miles of distance to be exact. North Korea has working ICBMs, but they don't work that great. Here's how their second ICBM launch went.: it flew for 45 minutes and traveled 1,000 kilometers or, 621 miles." That's if it gets by the missile defenses of 3 different countries.
So, for most Americans, you're more than safe from a North Korean nuke. Guam... no so much. Guam is the western-most United States territory, it's home to nearly 200,000 people, and it also holds many US military bases. It is also well within North Korea's range to strike with an ICBM.
It's bad enough that Kim Jong-Un is itching to launch a nuke, but Trump seems to be as well — as evidenced when he three times asked his foreign policy experts during his campaign regarding nuclear weapons — 'If we have them, why don't we use them?" What makes this all scarier is that Trump's "fire and fury" statement was improvised! : While it looked like Trump was speaking from a sheet of talking points, the information in from of him was actually in regards to the opioid crisis. Trump did not run his warning statement by anyone else.
While it seems unlikely that North Korea with attack the US, it should be very concerning that world leaders, one of them being our president, are this eager to use the deadliest weapon man has created.