Ol' Duke and the DPRK

When I was in the USAF, I once had a drug dog named Duke.

Now Ol' Duke was a somewhat nutty dog, in fact one of the nuttiest that I ever handled or trained. What made Ol' Duke nutty was not only that he was flaky and hard to train as a drug dog, but the fact that he played bad-ass all the time---especially with me. Rub his stomach and he'd growl and give me the eye like he was ready to chew my arm off. Tell him to get into a vehicle and he'd do the same. Tell him to get out and ditto. Sometimes, he even growled when he peed.

One day, when I was taking him back to the kennels to put him away after a midnight shift, he seemed to sense that I was going on break for 3 days. He was not especially enthusiastic about that. When I reached over to grab the leash and take him out of the car, he grabbed my forearm with his mouth, looked me right in the eye, and put just a little pressure on---not enough to really hurt, but enough that I could feel his big canines pushing into my skin.

Now I had seen all of Duke's tricks before, and although I usually just laughed at him, this was different. Duke may have been a bit of a bluffer, but he had bitten a previous handler and was, of course, attack-trained. I wasn't afraid of the old boy, but I did have respect for what he could do.

Ol' Kim Jung Il et al of North Korea have been making noises again. Just a day or so ago, they changed their stance that any nukes that they produced would only be for defensive purposes and said that they would now use them in a "merciless offensive".

I no longer have any access to any classified information. About all I can do is read media reports and items from various sources on the Internut, and everyone knows how unreliable those often are. But I do think that I "know" enough to guess that the DPRK's latest growls are nothing but growls, for exactly what nukes are they gonna use? I suppose they could have more ready to go than the two that they tested, but I kinda doubt it.*

Ol' Duke had more sense as he had something to back up his growls and it wouldn't have gotten him killed if he did. Is far as I know, the DPRK can only fully back up theirs by killing thousands of South Koreans in Seoul and starting a war which would assure the destruction of the regime.

I felt sorry for Ol' Duke** and stayed late playing with him that morning and later came back during my break to spend more time with him. Who will feel sorry for Ol' Kim?

*24 June: Estimates are that they have enough plutonium for at least 6. I have seen other estimates that they may already have several more. There seems to be few who believe that they have the ability to mount any on missiles yet.

**Alas, poor old Duke is long gone, unlike the should-have-been-history-by-now Stalinist government of North Korea.