They've been able to hit Alaska, Hawaii and Seattle since 2009 and nobody gave a shit. - Freeman Dyson
Those of us who were seriously engaged in the war were very grateful to Wernher von Braun. We knew that each V-2 cost as much to produce as a high-performance fighter airplane. We knew that German forces on the fighting fronts were in desperate need of airplanes, and that the V-2 rockets were doing us no military damage, each impact killed only six people on average. From our point of view, the V-2 program was almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament!"
Have you... seen the man's hair? We've been talking about Russian spies with names like "Sergei Kislyak" for a year now. I'll admit it - I've been reading a lot more modern Russian history and North Korean autobiographies than I would have expected five years ago. Shit be geopolitically disquieting. But I also remember an interview Iran's foreign minister gave back in 2006 or so. He said (paraphrasing) "Bush declared three countries were the 'Axis of Evil.' One had nuclear weapons. One was invaded. We are the third. Of course we have a nuclear program." The USSR was a massive geopolitical enigma that we chose to "contain" rather than deal with but we knew beyond a reasonable doubt that behind that containment it was an unstoppable military juggernaut. https://media.defense.gov/2016/Mar/09/2001475984/-1/-1/0/151014-D-AN790-022.JPG We want to think of North Korea in similar terms because it's what we know. It's what we're used to. Parallels are easier to deal with than new information. But North Korea is more of a cult than a country. With the Soviet Union our worry was Mutually Assured Destruction. With North Korea our worry is they'll get a shot off before we crush the shit out of them and they spill death and destruction all over South Korea. It's not that we shouldn't worry. It's that it's a different kind of worry. North Korea doesn't win a war of any kind with anyone. The minute stuff gets hot anywhere near that peninsula, North Korea loses finally and completely; the only real question is how much they take down with them. They're winning right now, though - the greater a threat they can project, the more time they buy to keep on keeping on. Kim Jong Un is 33. He's got another 30-40 years to keep the Imperialists at bay. And that's what he's focused on.