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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

It's unclear that NATO + Japan need to do anything. What is North Korea going to do, hit Tokyo? That would be the surest way to get Pyongyang "liberated" ASAP ...

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Let’s say they don’t attack with nukes but just shoot small conventional warheads every now on then, like Israel and Gaza. It’s not enough justification to go for an all out war, being that NK have nukes.

Israel and Gaza et al is a civil war, an internal matter much different from sovereign nations from different global treaties attacking each other.

Not a civil war at all. Gazans aren't citizens of Israel, they have their own elections and government. But if you insist, you can switch "Gaza" to "Lebanon" which fires missiles at Israel every now and then as a nuisance (just did a few weeks ago).

It's a struggle for sovereignty over disputed land which has largely been under both sides at one point or another in recent history. "What about <pedantry>" doesn't need to apply here. The definitions and situation is fuzzy. The point is that it is a vastly different situation than China-supported DPRK firing missiles at Japanese population centers.

Seoul is like 35mi from NK borders, or like 1.5 tiles in Civilization hexmap. It’s actually too far for IRL howitzers to set up and bombard the city but not comfortably. So it’s not a good idea to set them off when retaliation is expected.

With rocket assisted projectiles (RAP), North Korea's Koksan self propelled guns have a demonstrated range of 37 miles. Note that this is based on the performance of the guns observed during the Iran-Iraq war, and it is entirely possible that further improvements to range have been made in the past 30 years.

Also, it's 35 miles from the DMZ to the center of Seoul, but Seoul is a big city. There are parts of Seoul proper less than 25 miles from the DMZ, and the metropolitan area extends much closer still. Hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea live within comfortable artillery range of North Korea.

The thing is, North Korea is right next to South Korea, so they don't need fancy missile to stir up trouble. Simple artillery is enough, as they actually did in 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Yeonpyeong

And, contrary to some popular theories, actually attacking your neighbor is not that useful for bargaining. All it does is to make other countries very angry and call for more hardline policies. So the best NK can do is keep its madman shtick, not actually use the missiles, and demand larger concessions. But other countries would want, in turn, some semblance of promise that NK will stop being so crazy if it gets economic aid. So we're back to stalemate.

Gaza gets invaded now and then. I'm pretty confident that when the first conventional warheads land in Tokyo, it will be all out war.

Yes, it's funny how there is a lot of fear about a country that attacked noone since the Korea War (and that didn't commit massacres during it unlike their opponent), especially when those people are from a country that have a carte blanche to attack other countries and do it on a regular basis.

NK rulers aren't idiots, they have access to the West (media and travel) and they know about the relative military strength and probably aren't to keen to have Democracy™ being forcefully implemented on them.

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