maybe as demetri argues, we can play this game, too, we can try to tamper with your internal politics and so forth. but do you think they've made a fundamental mistake by misunderstanding the kind of, say, the kind of current semi hysterical nature of american politics, in that there has been a ferocious counter reaction to this. it's breathed new life into both the hawks on the republican side as well as given the democrats a new rationale for going after the russians. and if so, does this provide us an opportunity as george was suggesting to maybe work out a new understanding along the lines of noninterference? and secondly, in terms of their information activities, i guess the question i have is how did they -- fairly quickly if you follow george's scenario -- how did they get so good at this? i mean, hillary clinton and her interviews now after her book was published has even suggested to be able to kind of fine tune their information activities to target certain states that were kind of strategic in terms of the election, she's actually suggested that they needed some sort of ame

yeah, indeed we do have the americans deterred and the south koreans for the very good reasons that demetri just laid out. the consequences of taking action has the potential of restarting the korean war with loss of life. so it makes perfectly good sense that we ought to not stop talking. it strikes me that we need to also make sure as best we can that the north koreans think that we have them deterred. and through either exercises, a nuclear posture review that undoes the last posture review that tried to reduce the salience of nuclear weapons. and perhaps we talk about what would happen if north korea uses a nuclear weapon, say in a way that is not cloaked in ambiguous language but is very specific and those sorts of things, to try to make pyongyang a less self assured, that in fact there would be really, really bad consequences. and a way they spell that out in a way that's unmistakable, to begin the discussion to making sure they are also deterred. >> that's a good point. jim keith? thank you, mike. >> jim keith, i'm a retired american diplomat and currently a business consultant with