Are North Korea and Russia as dangerous as the media is suggesting?
The number of conspiracy stories in mainstream media has been on the rise recently with stories such as North Korea launching an EMP attack on the United States, Russia planning an invasion of Canada, meddling with the Brexit vote and the U.S elections.
While many of these ideas have been floated around due to the recent release of the Wikileaks vault 7, the mainstream media seems to have taken to publishing these stories that they might once have ignored due to a seeming attitude shift of the general public of late.
This change in public perception had left many people a lot less trusting of government agencies and establishments which might once have been able to cover up the truth when it suited them.
Albeit not all of the recent stories are necessarily anything to worry about.
In reality, North Korea lacks both the will and the technology to launch any kind of attack on the United States, despite their constant saber rattling and missile tests. Many experts, in fact, think that most it not all of the supposed nuclear tests that North Korea undertook were in fact simply high explosives rather than actual nuclear weapons.
A crude nuclear missile detonated in the atmosphere above the United States could cause a massive EMP pulse that would cripple the U.S energy grid for a short time. The repercussions, however, would be too damaging to North Korea to warrant them ever trying this, regardless of how their leader might feel about the United States. Ex-CIA agent Peter Vincent Pry was quoted by the sun as saying: "Even a low-yield, primitive weapon like the bomb used in Hiroshima will produce a potentially catastrophic EMP field because it's simply attacking things that are not hardened."
Featuring even more prominently than Kim Jong Un in the media lately however is Vladimir Putin who has been accused everything from rigging the Brexit vote to influencing the U.S and French elections, and plotting an invasion of Canada. While some of these stories may sound rather far-fetched, the rapidly decreasing power Russia has on a world stage may have seen their desperate attempts to stay relevant resort to some of the things that they are accused of.
Russia's recent skirmishes with the Ukraine, annexing Crimea and even the invasion of Georgia were all attempts by Russia to remain globally influential and powerful. Attempting to destabilize the western alliance of countries which by contrast to the Russian federation is much more economically and militarily powerful is seemingly Russia's last option. Certainly, Britain leaving the EU and France electing a right wing president are things that could potentially benefit Russia, whether this indicates that they till have the means to achieve this is another matter.
Similarly an invasion of Canada might sound like something that would benefit Russia but currently, Canada has a larger economy than Russia meaning an invasion would not be as easy as it might have been 20 years ago. That is without taking into account the fact that the United States would certainly intervene on Canada's behalf, and that the European powers and Nato may well see any conflict as a chance to rid themselves of Russian threat entirely.
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