En route to the inferno

“What is different about this approach is: we’re out of time, right?” [National Security adviser H.R.] McMaster said on Friday. “We have been kicking the can down the road and we’re out of road. For those who have been commenting about the lack of a military option – there is a military option.
--The Guardian (9-15-17)

I'm flying to Thailand next month for a family gathering.  I change planes at ... at Seoul, South Korea.  Seoul is 35 miles from the border with North Korea. 

As I noted in this blog last month, The Economist has predicted that if the United States should win a war with North Korea, successfully fighting off all attempted strikes against American territory, Seoul itself would nevertheless be the target of a nuclear attack with an immediate loss of 300,000 civilian lives, and with others dying later of radiation poisoning.  The South Korean armed forces would sustain additional hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Somehow, I don't think that commercial jets would be flying in and out of Seoul-Incheon International Airport anytime soon thereafter.

And once I make it successfully to Thailand, I still have to worry about returning -- again through Seoul -- three weeks later.

Mulling all of this over makes me think of all the American tourists who had been happily planning to visit Europe in the fall of 1939.  Hitler's attack on Poland must have caused some reflection on the wisdom of such a vacation, although I read reports that many tourists continued risking the five day transatlantic voyage (or for the very rich, a transatlantic flight) during the so-called phoney war, the period of relative calm between the attack on Poland and the attack on France eight months later. 

Germany continued to invite tourism with one hand -- while planning war with the other -- right up until their tanks rolled across the Polish border.  At least war was waged at a somewhat slower pace in those days, allowing would-be tourists to cancel plans and head for Mexico instead.  In today's world, President Trump may order a strike on Pyongyang after my plane lifts off from Seattle, and Seoul would have been destroyed in retaliation before my plane had crossed the International Date Line.

But -- like tourists in 1939 -- I'll just hope for the best and plan on having a great trip -- which I most likely will -- but I'll realize in a tiny, secluded part of my brain that the world as we now know it may go up in a mushroom cloud before my plane runs out of fuel.

Bon Voyage! (And kick that can a bit farther down the road, Mr. McMaster.)