Threat from the DPRK (North Korea)

[Mikebert]

(09-19-2017, 01:52 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: If the US attacks only the nuclear program and not the Kim regime, then the risk of Kim shelling Seoul and dooming his own regime is very small.

This seems reckless to me. The only military options that seem rational to me would be a decapitation attack or a full scale nuclear strike designed to destroy the nation and exterminate the North Korean population.

Doing the latter as a first strike would make us a pariah nation, like Nazi Germany and so would only make sense if it were in response to a nuclear strike against us or our allies. In fact this was our stance wrt to the USSR in the initial phases of the Cold War, when we had versus the USSR the same sort of nuclear superiority as we have wrt NK. We never did it because they never attacked us (and this was with Stalin, who was probably even more evil than Kim).

A decapitation attack would result in tens of thousands dead in the capital and would probably also require tactical nuclear strikes against military targets to blunt a response until SK can mount an invasion.  The best chance of success would be to launch a surprise attack *after* the US has completed a unilateral withdrawal of all military forces from S. Korea complete with a public "look to you own defenses" speech by the president. This would serve to deescalate tensions and increase the probability that Kim and his top ministers will killed by a surprise attack out of the blue.

Or we could just pull out and rely on deterrence, which would be my preference.