Russians have moved within 11 miles of Nork's northern border, with a lot of hardware. China is positioning. US personnel personal traffic (message boards and such) from those stationed in SKorea and Japan has been really light for the last 72 hours, like everyone's busy. (I'm an adult mil brat, with two retired siblings and two retired siblings-in-law and a lot of old friends who are still active. We have boards and slack channels and gaming guilds.) And our government has been obfuscating where a carrier group is.
My best hope right now is that Lil Kim will notice the three extremely unhappy grownups who are giving him stink-eye, and back himself down before he paints his shit all over the walls. Not likely -- he's spent his entire regime being the biggest tantrum-thrower in the world and getting indulged for it, but now there's an even more unstable tantrum thrower who has a lot more weapons, money and a far bigger army.
This feels like all three countries firmly suspect there's about to be an atmospheric test, and the UN Non-Proliferation protocol is a unified destruction of facilities upon radiation detection.
I am hoping -- would be praying if I did that -- that all three countries are coordinating. If they're not, this has the potential to go very, very bad, and very, very quickly.
The Chinese don't telegraph their mobilization, and they don't mobilize like this unless they're serious.
(I am deeply ambivalent on this -- the world will be a much better place when Lil Kim is tucked into a cell at The Hague, and China and South Korea take over administration of the cult that pretending to be a country, but North Korea is already a humanitarian disaster and neither bombs nor radiation can make it any better.)
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