Button Boy

I enjoy drawing Kim Jong Un almost as much as I like drawing Donald Trump. Why, if I lived in North Korea, well, I’d be dead. But you get the idea.

North Korea’s dictator used his annual address on New Year’s Day to ease tensions with the United States and South Korea, while also boasting of his nuclear capabilities. Though, in North Korea, it’s not 2018. It’s Juche 107.

Kim is desperate for his nation to be recognized as a nuclear power. I suppose having nuclear weapons alone does not make you a nuclear power, it’s your ability to deliver them.

Kim said “all of the mainland of the United States is within the range of our nuclear strike.” Believing the ease of such a strike makes you an official nuclear power, he also said, “It’s not a mere threat but a reality that I have a nuclear button on my desk.” Well isn’t that lovely? I do hope he means it figuratively and not literally. If he’s trying to emulate our leader’s desk layout, I wouldn’t want him to confuse his nuclear button for the one that brings him a Diet Coke.

I propose to the Dear Leader that he look into the nuclear football option. That’s where an aide carries a briefcase around that requires a code to launch nuclear missiles. The aide is always near the leader in case a strike is required, or he needs party guests at Mar-a-Lago to pose with it.

Kim is also trying to defuse tensions between the North and the South by offering to send athletes to the Winter Olympics which will take place in South Korea this February. Even this simple matter requires talks and negotiations. The North will look for a cease in military maneuvers by the South and the U.S., or/and easing of the four sanctions the United Nations placed upon them in 2017 (Juche 106).

Whether the North sends athletes or not to the Olympics, I expect them to test a missile during the games since international attention will be on the peninsula for those two weeks.

If there is actual progress between the North and South, the credit will go South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, and Kim Jong Un’s willingness, depending upon how desperate Kim is at the moment. It will be despite Donald Trump’s rhetoric of raining “fire and fury” on North Korea and his Twitter feed.

I do hope North Korea sends athletes to the Olympics. The gesture may help keep little chubby fingers that belong to despots, eastern and western, off nuclear buttons.

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