North Korea!

[A_Van]

New SK president has been just sworn in. Let's see if any changes take place. He vaguely mentioned that would be interested to soften tension with NK.
When "peacemakers" arrive in such situations, I always have ambivalent feelings because the whole thing depends on both sides. And if the "bad side" uses this "warming" to speed up the development of weapons, all would lose in the end.

On the military side of the coin, I am sure that pre-emptive strike against fat Kim-the-grandson has not taken place because the scenarios were accurately simulated, carefully evaluated and consequences found unacceptable. Current modeling and simulation (M&S) techniques and tools are good enough and way more accurate than trivial math based on the Lanchester's laws. Realistic behavior of hundreds of thousand interacting entities can be simulated. Indeed, characteristics of all the NK weapons are well-known as well as their locations. Behavior and dynamics can also be predicted to a large extent (e.g. processes like "shoot and scoot" or "shoot and hide").

SK military undertake such simulations and training nearly every year with campaigns lasting for about two weeks (!) with involvement of all high-level military staff and many civilian authorities. US DoD M&S experts support them a great deal. Thus, no doubt they all are aware of all the details and potential scenarios. And the fact that those LVC exercises last for 2 weeks testifies (at least indirectly) to difficulties in shutting down NK after the first round of fire exchange.

Again, I am pretty sure that tens of thousands of civilian casualties of SK population near the border is the only limiting factor. If it could be removed somehow, all those Kims would be eliminated shortly along with their names well before they possess NW and BMs. But how to do that? Even if a massive evacuation takes place in the north part of the RoK, NK would consider it as a "casus belli".

Thus, if there is any chance of peaceful measures to work, such lines should be elaborated and tried. Obviously, the best way would be propaganda and arranging more contacts with SK relatives so that NK people would see "how things work" in the South. Such a programme was once opened, but then dropped, AFAIK. And how to educated people in NK without contacts when even the radio receivers there have "hardwired" fixed frequencies and changing them (f) would cost you too much. Difficult....