THOUGHTS ON NORTH KOREA

North Korea has decided to invest in 20th Century technology when already into the 2nd decade of the 21st Century.  Its entry into the thermonuclear club is at a time when the other members of the club have a successful countermeasure, namely MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, which makes thermonuclear weapons obsolescent, if not obsolete, It would seem that investments in them to be the height of folly.

China, to whom a millennium is a practical time frame, is probably perplexed at the impatience that a man like Trump has to solve a problem that, in effect, has been solved in the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union which has rendered nuclear weapons an expensive storage problem but not an existential threat.  If a nation wishes to invest their time and effort in old musketry, the Chinese feel that time itself will take care of that nation.  

As research, in the rest of the world, into guided anti-missile defenses, as well as laser technology, proceeds, it may very well be that all the North Korean labors will have been in vain.