They do have missiles with sufficient range to threaten most of their neighbors. They've got a three stage missile that only needs a bit of refinement.

This is officially scary.

I've heard a number from an MSNBC article that said the seismic indications were only sufficient for a 550 ton explosion.

That's a might small for a nuke, even the SADM and MADM devices the US deployed were up in the 25kt range...

Could this be a bit of smoke and mirrors?

Interesting. The Russian article linked above indicated it was 10 to 30 times that size, but 550 Tons is a pretty small explosion for a nuke.

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Forming opinions as we speak

you could fake that using your overstock conventional explosives.

5-15 kiloton would be a bit harder...

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15190745/

There's the meat of it. Guess it boils down to whom do you believe...

Magnitude 4.2 would mean it's a lot bigger than 500 tons
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/...kes/ustqab.php
more like a number of 5 kilotons, some of the US explosions at the Nevada site were about this size

Gotcha, so it wasn't smoke and mirrors. I'll just be going back to my antacid cocktails now...

But they won't have nuclear warheads, no way.

Not more than before. The nukes North Korea have are crude and huge in size (but small in yield). They can blow up mountains but they can't use them against anyone for several years.

A military attack into North Korea is out of question. An offensive would lead casuality numbers far bigger than in Iraq--outside North Korea. Seoul, one of the largest cities in the world could easily be transformed into a sea of fire by North Korean artillery. Not to mention other regions of South Korea bordering the demilitarized zone. Major Japanese cities may get some hits from the longer range missiles.

Still I think the current regime's days are soon numbered. The point of the test was to strengthen the position of North Korea in future negotiations, but they really managed to upset China. I look into my crystal ball and see a possible coup in the future. Another possibility is that the country can no longer sustain itself and simply implodes resulting in a huge stream of refugees into China.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Don't worry, they'll make more. Rather than feeding their own people. A tin-horn dictator with bad hair has to have his priorities, after all!

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

The fact that millions of people are starving there is not fun.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Actually, none of that is true, and I ought to know, I worked in command post tango in south korea and have seen the plans and seen it run through (several times) in exercises and simulations. There are people who have been thinking about this full time since the ceasefire of the Korean War and they're good at what they do. This would be the most meticulously planned war in history. These plans are even more detailed than what we had for fighting the Soviets in Eastern Europe.

If North Korea attacks first, they would be stopped short of Seoul this time - unless they use nukes. If we attack them, we can drive right up to PyongYang and actually wouldn't even take substantial casualties. However, the population of North Korea would suffer tremendously. There are entire divisions of South Korea artillery dedicated to counter-battery. If the North fires on Seoul instead of the military, then the land forces advance on PyongYang even faster. If they fire on the advancing forces, they buy themselves some time, but of course, North Korean civilians suffer even more.

And the only additional US division that is required to make this happen is (I believe) 2nd ID from Fort Lewis. All their equipment, including tanks and ammo, is prepositioned in Korea, loaded on trains in some cases, and the procedure for reception, staging, onward movement (to the battlefront) and integration into the forward line of troops is practiced every year in an exercise called, surprisingly, RSO&I. It all happens fast and with machine-like precision. It's a sight to behold. For the defensive scenarios, they don't even require any aircraft carriers or anything. All this could be done without taking much if anything from Iraq or Afghanistan.

North Korea would have to pull a major, serious rabbit out of the hat to change the outcome. Nuclear weapons are one such possible rabbit. Chemical weapons - not so much. In general, totalitarian regimes don't fight well because they don't trust their leaders to make decisions. They are too worried about coups.

For those of you who don't believe this, think back to the two Gulf Wars. Remember what pundits and news reporters predicted about that war. Omg! Saddam has the third largest Army in the world! I saw predictions that we would lose 10,000 soldiers getting to Baghdad and another 10,000 on the "siege" of Baghdad. The military had only a few months to plan that war and look how well they did. We rolled over the Iraqi Army (twice) and in the second war right into Baghdad - mission accomplished. In Korea, the plans are much better, much more detailed, and the military's performance would reflect that.

Occupation is something we don't do well. Waging war though, we're good at that. Theoretically, occupation is optional. We learned after WWI that it's good to rebuild countries, but it isn't mandatory. In a pinch, we could take out NK and then just leave.

I'm not advocating any of this, I'm just telling you what's possible. There isn't the political will to do it anyway. And furthermore, China would probably get a little upset.

But it is possible - I guarantee you, it's possible.

Edit to add: almost forgot, you have to do this in the winter time when the rice patties are frozen. Winter is on the way, but again, we don't have the political will to do anything.

The first thing about wars is that they never go according to the plan.

What about them?

Mission accomplished? Then why there are 140,000 US troops still there? There was a clear danger that the war could continue as a guerilla warfare. A threat that materialized.

North Korea's capacity may be, and hopefully is, greatly exaggerated. But no one knows how fanatically they will fight. Iraq and North Korea are two very different countries, so comparing them may not be justified.

Nobody wins if there will be a war in the Korean peninsula. South Koreans are very concerned about their norhern neighbor and are not keen to see too stern counter-measures that may be the last straws that break the camel's back.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

There's a quote from Norman Schwartzkopf, one part hilarity, one part absolute logic, about the "choreography" of war.

He described it as putting the players in their places, the orchestra in the pit, striking the first note, then having someone jump out of the pit and start chasing you around the stage with a knife.

Of course, Americans police world no?? Americans do not like blow up.

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So descredo no incrivel

Beauty I’d always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I can’t say anymore.

-- Moody Blues

I forgot to mention that Kim Jong Il is dependent on his father's advisors. Even the youngest of them are old and ailing (don't even think they're using local health services...) and he'll soon run out of them.

BTW, do you know who's the president of the DPRK? Kim Jong-il?

Wrong answer!

The president of North Korea's is Kim Il-sung, now and forever. Minor inconveniences such as death don't matter.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Ah, yes:
"No plan of battle ever survives first contact with the enemy."
Sun Tzu
Eisenhower
Napoleon
von Moltke
Murphy
et al

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

By your logic WWII is still being fought because US troops are still in Europe.

Let's try not to make this political, ok? Here are the facts: there used to be an Iraqi army with tanks and artillery and companies and battalions. It's gone now. Mission accomplished. The war is over and we are occupiers.

once again, I do know what I'm talking about here. War isn't like rolling a set of dice. Plans do actually work. I didn't say that everything would go exactly as planned, but I did say that NK would lose - and I'm right, they would lose.

I imagine that if we had this conversation in 1992 prior to the first gulf war, you would have been one of the people saying that US casualties would be more than 10,000. And I would say, "no actually we have a great combined arms strategy here." and then you would have scoffed and said, "wars don't go according to plan." This is ridiculous. Do you actually know anything about the north korean army? Any idea how they are organized? Any clue what a rock drop is? What are your opinions based on? Mine are based on experience.

Is good to suggest.
How many war Americans need? How many innocent people Americans want to kill?

__________________
So descredo no incrivel

Beauty I’d always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I can’t say anymore.

-- Moody Blues