Summarizer

Indeed. The DPRK was right from the start. They always were. For the longest time I thought they'd gone too far, but now we're the clowns putting on a show.

Sure, but there must always be a fear that the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty. And may tolerate a coupe instead. Which then reduces the madness and the deterrent effect. The extra step the Dprk have taken is to try and build bunkers so that the regime could survive the destruction of the country. A step further into madness that goes beyond what western countries have been willing to accept.

The US built a lot of bunkers like this back in the 1950's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Weather_Emergency_Operat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Rock_Mountain_Complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Greek_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_Mountain_Complex With the rise of solid fuel ICBM and then MIRV leading to the truly massive number of warheads pointed at the US, the US switched to airplanes for the most important continuity of government issues, figuring that the skies 30,000 above the US will largely be secure (presuming the plane is appropriately EMP shielded) due to the many US geographic advantages, and so it is the best place to ride out the initial attack and then take stock, get to somewhere safe, and figure out what to do from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Looking_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TACAMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-6_Mercury But the North Koreans can have no illusion that the skies above their country will be safe: there are several major enemy airbases a few minutes from their border, their entire airspace is routinely surveilled and powers hostile to them have made large investments in stealthy air superiority fighters, so the air is not a safe place for the DPRK continuity of government plans. The DPRK does have trains but I would not consider those safe in the event of a major war, since rails are difficult to keep secret. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taeyangho_armoured_train So bunkers are the best they can do, given their circumstances.

I think have thousands of artillery shells aimed at Seoul is the larger deterrent.

The nukes are to deter the US. They have been steadily increasing their missile range to first reach regional bases like Guam and now the all the way to the continental USA, and are now even launching a nuclear powered and nuclear armed ballistic missile submarine https://www.hisutton.com/DPRK-SSN-Update.html

The nukes are a bargaining chip (disarmament). Basically, if your country has the human and tech capital to develop a nuke, you probably should because it's free money. I don't believe that NK's nukes deter the US from doing anything. Would NK nuke Guam and risk getting carpet-bombed with nukes for endless days and nights until even the ants are dead? Artillery on Seoul doesn't matter. The US would just ask SK to evacuate it. The US doesn't do anything about the DPRK because it's not economically relevant (i.e. it doesn't have the world's largest oil reserves etc). In an ironic way, their economy being closed-off and mostly unintegrated with the Western world maintains the peace.

The nukes have many roles perhaps but I think the fully developed weapons are for retaliatory strike. They are the North Korean leadership saying that if the US (or China or anyone really) tries to surgically decapitate them (like the US just did in Venezuela) then the nukes are used to take the attackers with them

Guess the US's mistake was not decapitating NK earlier then. Too late for NK, not too late for other regimes.

Yes that's the orthodox doctrine of nuclear deterrent. To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems so that your second-strike capability remains intact through any decapitation attempts. If you don't have the triad then you need to brandish your capability more ostentatiously, like France does with its deliberate refusal to commit to a no-first-strike policy. This is (one of the many reasons) why North Korea does so much sabre-rattling: they don't have a (publicly known) nuclear triad for deterrence.

> To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems The core parts for MAD land-based missile silos (to soak up the enemy's missiles) and submarines (to ensure a second strike). Planes are largely a diplomatic deterrent inasmuch as they're easy to send out and easy to recall. But Pyongyang isn't playing MAD. It's playing credible threat. And for a credible threat, you just need missiles. (On land or on subs.) The point is that you raise the stakes of e.g. a Maduro operation to risking Los Angeles.

> Artillery on Seoul doesn't matter. The US would just ask SK to evacuate it. How do you evacuate 10 to 15 million(counting Incheon in) of people, fast? Where to?

Proportionally that's about evacuating all of California. Completely ridiculous, which is exactly why DPRK has installed all that artillery.

The importance of this is often exaggerated. It's significant, but it's not that significant. RAND Corporation modeled this, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA619-1.html It assumes ~130,000 casualties from a worst-case surprise attack on population centers by the North. If a conflict started ramping up, evacuations would rapidly shrink this. A significant deterrent, sure. But it rapidly becomes less and less meaningful as the DPRK builds its nuclear arsenal.

They're safe, but at what cost? They drive old cars, have slow internet and can't visit the coliseum. They're not invited to the cool parties.

Nah, Kim will now wet his bed for weeks. If any dictator willing to deliberately kill thousands for nothing knew he could wake up in a chopper the world would have been a better place.

NK is protected by China, a very credible force.

Maduro may have been aligned with them, but that is a completely different thing than being protected by them. The DPRK is actually protected by the PRC, in the sense that the PRC is willing to and historically did deploy millions of soldiers to push back Americans from North Korean territory.

But note that happened in rhe 1950s, when Mao was in power and the PRC was an upstart separatist regime with very limited recognition. Now China may want to act very differently.

The reason Mao helped Pyongyang still applies: namely, it would make China less secure to have on its border a regime allied to a great power other than China.

China, Cuba and Russia sent him air defences and some personal guards. What would China's millions do if Kim was kidnapped? Invade Seoul that had no say in it?

From where would an hypothetical operation to kidnap Kim be launched? Likely from SK or Japan, right? So yes, China could retaliate. The operation against Maduro was launched from countries in the region aligned with the US.

That is a bold assertion to make considering China literally did retaliate against the US in North Korea once already, to the tune of war. Kidnapping heads of states is an act of war. Venezuela can't defend itself, but China certainly will do whatever is necessary to secure its vassal if the alternative is NK collapsing and having US military bases on its border. You also rule out the possibility of an invasion of Seoul, as though it would be "unfair" -- when you're advocating for and actively in the process of tearing whatever remains of the concept of international law to shreds, what makes you think PRC would be inclined to play nice?

My point is that since in this scenario SK would likely be involved in some capacity (granting safe passage, harboring US planes, etc) they would suffer retaliation by NK and possibly China. I don't see what's unlikely about this, it's basically NK's defense strategy.

China knows about carriers, and tracks them carefully. They have built a variety of weapons to sink them, too, but I don’t think they’d need to use them: note how the raid on Maduro went so quietly that people have been looking for evidence that some of the Venezuelan military were in on it? North Korea has built up a lot more paranoia and China wouldn’t need to sink a carrier, simply ensuring that the NK military knows what’s coming as soon as planes take off and communicates that in a way which makes it impossible for any potentially disloyal faction to act short of declaring a coup (you can’t “accidentally” miss something the entire chain of command knows about). I detest the NK government but I’d expect that to be a much bloodier fight, especially after a huge warning.

> Us has these nifty things called aircraft carriers, which were used to capture Maduro as well. It wasn't just carriers in Maduro's case. The operation was carried from multiple places, including out of Caribbean countries aligned with the US. The US was literally signing deals with those countries months in advance. Who would those countries be in an hypothetical NK strike? Because those countries would suffer retaliation.

Nuclear capability wouldn't necessarily rule out this kind of a decapitation strike, it's just that it's very hard to imagine this kind of an operation actually being successful in any nuclear-capable country. The US couldn't just fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes. Most likely every single one of those helicopters would end up being shot down.

>It's extremely difficult to believe that the US could fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes. Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention. Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did.

>Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention. No. The obstacle isn't Chinese intervention, the obstacle is that such an operation would have to be significantly larger and it would take longer. There would be much more air defense assets to suppress, and some of them would be impossible to effectively defeat. A helicopter assault on either of those cities would in the most optimistic scenario take hours of preparatory bombing, which would give a plenty of time for nuclear retaliation by North Korea. Both countries would also certainly have better safeguarding mechanisms for their heads of state, during that bombing they would be evacuated and now you'd probably be looking at the very least at a weeks-long operation. Assassination is a different thing, but I would suspect that for purely psychological reasons a rapid kidnapping operation like this would be far less likely to invite anything more than symbolic retaliation than a single targeted missile strike. This kind of operation would be far more confusing for the enemy than a simple assassination, and the window during which for example nuclear retaliation might make sense tends to be rather small. >Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did. Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one. They'd have shot down every single helicopter. You don't even need fancy missiles, a bunch of .50cal machine guns will do the trick.

Your tone is unnecessarily condescending and confrontational, but your point is reasonable with respect to Venezuela and Maduro. With Iran, North Korea, or Ukraine, the calculus is different.

What happens when you start making nukes and the US doesn't want you to? Ssetting aside the whole non-proliferation thing, or expense (see NK), etc. Let's get serious, please.

Why set aside expense? You do it anyway by whatever means necessary, like the DRPK. And if you’re a “western democracy” (also known as capitalist dictatorship) and you’re part of the ruling class, you still have the incentive to protect your assets, things you exploit in your country, land, natural resources, etc, that the US won’t be sharing or that they want to decrease supply when they take over through puppets or multinationals, and you can always force the public to pay for such a project, like all the times western peoples had to bail out or spend their taxes to benefit private corporations, but now it would look like it’s to protect sovereignty, which is a bonus of course, it would be to protect the local ruling class’s interests, but anyway. It’s clear the Americans will stop at nothing to acquire whatever it is they want, including indirectly violent means like ordering their financial institutions and tech giants to destroy whoever is on the way. The monster was always there since the Cold War and just now it dropped any pretenses.