I don't pretend to understand the complexities, but things on the Korean Peninsula appear fairly disturbing.
If you allow the possibility that US and North Korea may come to blows, there appears to be two likely scenarios:
1. The conflict is non-nuclear, it remains regionalisedand does not escalate. 2. It escalates really quickly - drawing in China and Russia and pretty much instantly the rest of the world - and it will be nuclear.
How scenario two will affect us in New Zealand is anyone's guess. While we probably don't have a nuke aimed at us, we could be a small pocket of surviving humanity, and potentially facing an almost deadly nuclear winter. Or if the nuclear is exchange is less widespread and the fallout contained to the Northern Hemisphere as some have theorised, we could be growing veges in our back gardens and doing our best to survive. Neither is a pleasant outlook.
It's perfectly normal to ponder such scary scenarios but not to get carried away by them. Diplomacy, no make that common sense, will prevail. Not much is likely to be fixed, but talking takes the heat out of things. And that will happen when the current role playing and chest beating has done its dash.
I tend to believe it is all a scripted and well theorised play on behalf of the US to move a few chess pieces around the board and will not amount to armed conflict.
But if North Korea didn't manage to abort that wonky missile it could have been Guyfawkes like you've never seen it. It's tense. It has already been likened to the Cuban Missile Crisis and it's not over yet.
At the risk of standing accused of being a knee-jerker and over-reactor I confess to thinking through our emergency-preparedness kit inventory and wondering if I should talk to family about contingencies. But that's as far as I got.
For what it is worth an independent group - The Defcon Warning System - has the world on alert 4 of a five step scale, with one being dire. So things aren't likely to kick off.
