13 June 2018 – Ever wonder why Kim Jong Un is so willing to talk about giving up his nuclear arsenal? Sort-of-President Donald Trump (POTUS) seems to think it’s because economic sanctions are driving North Korea (officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK) to the finacial brink.

That may be true, but it is far from the whole story. As usual, the reality star POTUS is stuck decades behind the times. The real World War III won’t have anything to do with nukes, and it’s started already.

The threat of global warfare using thermonuclear weapons was panic inducing to my father back in the 1950s and 1960s. Strangely, however, my superbrained mother didn’t seem very worried at the time.

By the 1980s, we were beginning to realize what my mother seemed to know instinctively — that global thermonuclear war just wasn’t going to happen. That kind of war leaves such an ungodly mess that no even-marginally-sane person would want to win one. The winners would be worse off than the losers!

The losers would join the gratefully dead, while the winners would have to live in the mess!

That’s why we don’t lose sleep at night knowing that the U.S., Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and, in fact, most countries in the first and second worlds, have access to thermonuclear weapons. We just worry about third-world toilets (to quote Danny DeVito’s character in The Jewel of the Nile) run by paranoid homicidal maniacs getting their hands on the things. Those guys are the only ones crazy enough to ever actually use them!

We only worried about North Korea developing nukes when Kim Jong Un was acting like a total whacko. Since he stopped his nuclear development program (because his nuclear lab accidentally collapsed under a mountain of rubble), it’s begun looking like he was no more insane than the leaders of Leonard Wibberley’s fictional nation-state, the Duchy of Grand Fewick.

In Wibberley’s 1956 novel The Mouse That Roared, the Duchy’s leaders all breathed a sigh of relief when their captured doomsday weapon, the Q-Bomb, proved to be a dud.

Yes, there is a hilarious movie to be made documenting the North Korean nuclear and missile programs.

Okay, so we’ve disposed of the idea that World War III will be a nuclear holocaust. Does that mean, as so many starry-eyed astrophysicists imagined in the late 1940s, the end of war?

Fat f-ing chance!

The winnable war in the Twenty-First Century is one fought in cyberspace. In fact, it’s going on right now. And, you’re missing it.

Cybersecurity and IT expert Theresa Payton, CEO of Fortalice Solutions, asserts that suspected North Korean hackers have been conducting offensive cyber operations on financial institutions amid discussions between Washington and Pyongyang on a possible nuclear summit between President Trump and Kim Jong Un.

“The U.S. has been able to observe North Korean-linked hackers targeting financial institutions in order to steal money,” she says. “This isn’t North Korea’s first time meddling in serious hacking schemes. This time, it’s likely because the international economic sanctions have hurt them in their wallets and they are desperate and strapped for cash.”

There is a long laundry list of cyberattacks that have been perpetrated against U.S. and European interests, including infrastructure, corporations and individuals.

“One of N. Korea’s best assets … is to flex it’s muscle using it’s elite trained cyber operations,” Payton asserts. “Their cyber weapons can be used to fund their government by stealing money, to torch organizations and governments that offend them (look at Sony hacking), to disrupt our daily lives through targeting critical infrastructure, and more. The Cyber Operations of N. Korea is a powerful tool for the DPRK to show their displeasure at anything and it’s the best bargaining chip that Kim Jong Un has.”

Clearly, DPRK is not the only bad state actor out there. Russia has long been in the news using various cyberwar tactics against the U.S., Europe and others. China has also been blamed for cyberattacks. In fact, cyberwarfare is a cheap, readily available alternative to messy and expensive nuclear weapons for anyone with Internet access (meaning, just about everybody) and wishing to do anybody harm, including us.

“You can take away their Nukes,” Payton points out, “but you will have a hard time dismantling their ability to attack critical infrastructure, businesses and even civilians through cyber operations.”

Programming Notes: I’ve been getting a number of comments on this blog each day, and it looks like we need to set some ground rules. At least, I need to be explicit about things I will accept and things I won’t:

• First off, remember that this isn’t a social media site. When you make a comment, it doesn’t just spill out into the blog site. Comments are sequestered until I go in and approve or reject them. So far, the number of comments is low enough that I can go through and read each one, but I don’t do it every day. If I did, I’d never get any new posts written! Please be patient.
• Do not embed URLs to other websites in comments. I’ll strip them out even if I approve your comment otherwise. The reason is that I don’t have time to vet every URL, and I stick to journalistic standards, which means I don’t allow anything in the blog that I can’t verify. There are no exceptions.
• This is an English language site ONLY. Comments in other languages are immediately deleted. (For why, see above.)
• Use Standard English written in clear, concise prose. If I have trouble understanding what you’re trying to say, I won’t give your comment any space. If you can’t write a cogent English sentence, take an ESL writing course!