Late last September, Vox held a chilling conversation with retired Navy Adm. James Stavridis, whose 37-year military career included a stint running NATO, and Michèle Flournoy, the No. 3 official at the Pentagon during the Obama administration, who has helped shape US policy toward North Korea since 1993. During it, Stavridis said that there was at least a 10 percent chance of a nuclear war between the U.S. and North Korea, and a 20 to 30 percent chance of a conventional conflict that could kill a million people or more. Meanwhile, Flournoy said that the way Trump talks about North Korea, made it “much more likely now that one side or the other will misread what was intended as a show of commitment or a show of force.” Vox’s Yochi Dreazen spent the past month asking more than a dozen former Pentagon officials, CIA analysts, US military officers, and think tank experts, as well as to a retired South Korean general who spent his entire professional life preparing to fight the North, what the risk of war is, and what the war would look like. They all said about the same thing: there is a real risk of a war on the Korean Peninsula that would involve the use of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Multiple experts estimated that millions of people would die. Most of the people told Dreazen that they think Kim would use nuclear weapons against South Korea early on in the fighting, not as a last resort. It would be nothing like the war in Iraq. North Korea is “so good” and not only has nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, but also might have real incentive to use them.
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