I sometimes wonder in situations like this whether we could just offer them $1B a head – take the pension, no questions asked. It would be cost-effective for us.
It could work as long as the people actually want to listen and don’t mind risking death to hear about what is happening. Supposedly North Koreans have a little more access to the real world than they used to because more of them have relatives who’ve escaped to China and things like that. But nobody should expect the people of North Korea to overthrow the government anytime soon even if a few of them learn a little more about the outside world. The Kims has been lying to them and controlling their lives and keeping them in the dark (BA-dum) for 60 years. How many of them would believe outside radio broadcasts or websites even if they saw them? Huge numbers of people died during the famines in the '90s and things can’t be going very well right now either, and it doesn’t look like a revolution is imminent according to anybody.
Why? I’m not saying that our present system is enough, but if we actually invested in it and built it up to the point where it could shoot down most or all of North Korea’s ballistic missiles, wouldn’t that be an effective counter to their ballistic missile program?
Have Mother Superior send it to nanny a big Austrian family.
We should do nothing. The problem will be solved through natural attrition. Information distribution is getting to be impossible to suppress. Slowly, more and more of the NK population will realize what the real world is like and change will come. All of NK’s saber rattling is just for show. They know that any act of aggression means suicide, and they’re not really interested in conquering other countries anyway. It’s all for their propaganda machine. There’s no need to intervene.
Everyone keeps saying NK has nuclear bombs but delivery systems have been catastrophic failures, so no need to worry. What’s stopping them from putting one of them under a pile of shower flip-flops in a shipping container, and detonating it when it gets to New York harbor?
Be sort of a long and round about trip to sail the thing from North Korea to New York, for one thing. 
I don’t know who is saying that NK delivery systems have all been ‘catastrophic failures’, but it’s clear that they are continuing to work on both refining their bomb design to make it lighter and on their ballistic missile delivery systems.
As for your question, there is nothing really stopping them…but unless they wanted all out war (in which they would be annihilated) it wouldn’t be too wise of them to do something like that. We’d be able to figure out fairly easily if it was them after all, and any nuclear strike against us or the SKs would pretty much bring the wrath of the gods down on the NKs heads.
Why do I feel like people have been saying this for 20 years?
Sanctions - I am sure nobody in the U.S. is buying anything from North Korea - and inspections (this new UN package allows for greater inspections on cargo as well as new financial measures) and the fact that they would get invaded and killed if it happened.
I read a cool SF story recently about how to solve the NK problem. No doubt our clever dopers here will know the title- it is gone from my memory.
Anyway, the gist of the story was that an international force “snuck” into NK with stealth planes and dropped a large amount of equipment. When dawn broke, the equipment was all set up - essentially a refugee camp, heavily armed and protected. When NK troops opened fire, defensive batteries and force fields protected all inside with no retaliatory fire.
Refugees could come in… but no bombs or bullets.
Soldiers in high tech robotic suits could go on patrol and disable any NK missile launchers, tanks etc. with virtually no harm to the NK soldiers. In fact, their strict orders were to never harm a NK soldier, only destroy their equipment.
The plan was to grow the refugee camps and keep them protected until there were virtually no NK citizens left in the country.
Really? Our spy satellites, capable of resolutions of at least 6" or so, can’t spot the thousands and thousands (or whatever) of artillery batteries pointed at Seoul?
10’s of thousands…and, by and large, the answer is ‘no’…they can’t. A lot of NKs artillery is dug into fortifications and completely hidden. Oh, we probably have a pretty good idea of where it is (though it is fairly mobile IIRC), and could probably take out quite a bit of it in a preemptive strike if we really wanted too…but a substantial number would still be able to fire at the SK capital before we finally pounded it all into scrap.
Including these self-propelled guns mounted on a tank chassis. This is North Korea’s deterrence against a foreign prompted change of regime, not nukes; if we wanted to intervene militarily then it seems that Seoul would have to be sacrificed, not a sacrifice worth making. On the other hand the North Korean military would never be stupid enough to actually launch at the US, I suspect Lil’ Kim would tragically meet with an unfortunate ‘accident’ if he ever gave actually the order to attack the US.
Are there any guesses about how long the country could last if the Pit thread suggestion of completely cutting of all diplomacy and aid is carried out? I’d wager that the regime would get on well enough and the lack of foreign aid would simply produce more bodies from North Korea’s unfortunate civilians.
In the past, NK could block almost 100% of the information coming in. Distribution of dissenting information would be very limited in scope and highly risky. But the technology now has reached a level where it’s impossible to stop. A cell phone is now a quad-core, wifi enabled computer that fits in a pocket and can be charged from a solar charger. This means it’s much easier and less risky for dissenters to get uncensored views of the world. And they are right next door to China, the country which is churning out endless of cell phones.
One way to bring about change would be to create special NK cell phones with a radio and embedded solar charger. Load them with plenty of pictures, news, books, Angry Birds, etc. Install a high-power AM radio tower in SK pointed towards NK. Smuggle millions of these into NK and let nature take its course.
They are in caves, theya re camoflauged and they are underground.
And spotting them is only part of the problem. Even if we had precise coordinates for each and every one of them, it takes some time destroy them all. And in that time they can launch tens or hundreds of thousands of shells into Seoul.
Very recently, South Koreans decided to take a chance and start buying up parcels of land next to the DMZ. One of the only places where you have several acres, nice new houses, and no traffic, in SK.
I wonder how they feel about their homesteads now?
Probably the same as the 10+ million in Seoul, which is very near the DMZ, and every strategist acknowledges would fall in hours, before US / SK joint troops arrived.
The SK’s in Busan and Cheju-Do Island are just hoping the radioactive winds don’t fall on their beaches, before the US/Sk forces smoke NK.
Realistically, NK is decades from matching a nuclear warhead to a stage 3 missile capable of hitting the USA. They have the warhead, but it is the size of a school bus. And they are in the 11th hour of perfecting a stage 3 missile.
My guess is they will rain missiles down on DC with propaganda flyers that say " Eat at Kimchi Kims"
I don’t think that is as true now as it once was. China is not the same country now as it was during the Cultural Revolution. It is gradually becoming more like a developed country. In many ways life in China, especially eastern China, is now more similar to South Korea than North Korea. I don’t think a unified Korea under the South Korean system would bother China very much if it didn’t have the US military presence; and the only reason the US has a military presence in SK is because of NK. The main reason is China continues to prop up the NK regime is, I think, because if it falls the result would be ugly, and would likely result in a significant refugee problem. There are signs, however, that China’s patience with NK is wearing thin.
I have not heard that Seoul would fall to the NK army - the concern is that it would be destroyed by the first round of hardened artillery shots coming from the North, before our counter-fire could penetrate and destroy it all (we have bunker busters for a reason - but they can’t hit fast enough to stop the first several rounds).
To actually invade, the NK side has to cross mine fields and hit the hardened defenses of the South and the US installations.
Earlier I asked this question. Let me re-phrase that.
If the CIA doesn’t take out Kim Jung-Un, can we assume they’re waiting for James Bond to do it? What are they waiting for?
Don’t say we never terminate heads of state.
I’ll let Fidel Castro say it.
I don’t think anybody believes that’s feasible or that it would solve the problem.