>>163721
You're caught up in "thinking special" rather than "thinking outside the box." If CNN reported that it snowed outside, you'd take the family out to swim in the pool.
Special and radical does not necessarily mean truth. People are afraid of unknowns. What people are pretty sure of is that NK is crazy-ville. What no one wants to risk is whether or not they have a nuke. Getting it here doesn't even enter most of their minds.
The wizard of oz is just a floating head. Not a whole body. Humans fixate on things they understand and identify with, rather than the things they don't. The booth was plain to see, but the head is where everyone looks.
Ultimately, you think what you want about NK. However, it doesn't change the relevance of my questions.
You do need air power and air defenses. Where does their electricity come from? Their food? Water? You can hole up in a bunker all you want to. If you can't poke your head out to shoot the guys coming to cut you out…. makes no difference.
You do need healthy ground forces. Not a paper army of starving conscripts who have an SKS and barely the education to formulate a prayer. But why not smart soldiers? What happens with them?
You need fuel - which means you need stores of it. You need munitions, and stores of it. You need mines for metal, some source of nitrates for muntions, and factories to process them. If not - you need a seller and a means with which to buy.
You need storage facilities and maintenance routines. You need weapons ranges and tests.
Look up Patton's Quicksilver. We fooled the Nazis into believing there was a massive force that never was. Central to this operation were double agents working for us - people the Nazis trusted the reports of. This extended credibility to the smoke and mirrors. This is also central to many magic tricks.
So… it's up to each anon to use their own reasoning, here. I am not going to tell you that there is zero chance NK is very heavily armed and well trained. I am, however, saying that I have not seen much in the way of evidence that shuch a large, well-trained military force exists outside of paper claims.
As for nuclear war - you think in terms of cost and damage. "Everyone loses." This is not the way to look at wars, as all wars are mutually destructive. If you can't win a nuclear war, then you can't win a snowball fight. The question is simply that of scale and temperature.
By what logic would North Korea being able to destroy… say… 30 cities and 15% of our population be a loss when we can take ownership of 100% of their landmass? It's a cost/benefit analysis.
But you need far more than 10 nukes to do that kind of damage to the U.S. We have simply been raised to fear the almighty nuke to the point where people are running from the ocean after Fukishima …. when nuclear testing in the 60s and 70s tipped far more background rads on the Geiger counter. Keep everything in a consistent perspective.