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Originally Posted by Wormius
I would be quite curious of China's response when/if South Korea decides it has had enough of the threats of nuclear attack / having ships attacked and uses the next provocation to justify action.
While China has sheer numbers, I don't believe it would come out unscathed in a WW3 event, if it was to side with NK as an opportunity to swallow up Japan and SK.
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I have my doubts that South Korea would actively go to war against North Korea without some serious provocation, and I'm not talking about sinking a frigate or shelling a small town, or the commando raids from the North that happen multiple times a year that never seem to make the papers.
North Korea's vaunted artillery belt is the perfect non nuclear deterrent, while South Korea has worked very hard on counter battery artillery technology, North Korea in the event of a war would get a first massive time on target lick on Seoul and could probably destroy the city without the use of nuclear arms. While not all the artillary could reach Seoul at least a large number of their bigger ones could.
On top of that there is the vast North Korean tunnel systems that are used to send commando's and fixed units across the border and some of those tunnels probably lead into the South Korean capital.
On top of that, if North Korea does in fact have a small primative nuclear bomb, they wouldn't even need to hit South Korea with it, they could merely fire it straight up and set off an EMP that could destroy most consumer level electronics.
Like I said, China might be displeased with North Korea, but I doubt that they have any interest in sending forces in to depose the government in place there, it serves a useful purpose, and there's a old military saying "If you invade em, you have to feed em". China would take a serious economic hit if they had to not only feed North Korea's population, but rebuild its infrastructure.
In terms of forces correlation in that area, North Korea has a massive army, but South Korea has a massive edge in technology, its to the point where its likely that South Korea wouldn't need American help to fight a war against the North. They also have a significant edge in terms of modern main battle tanks, and modern armored fighting vehicles that would make it tough for NK to counter unless the war was in the summer months which would not be good conditions for a modern armor battle.
When Kim Jung-Un came to power a lot of people tried to convince me that he was a young guy who was going to reform the government and start allowing some liberalization of the government in North Korea.
The truth is that Un is the spoiled son of a spoiled yet very politically saavy man, and he will be even more ruthless then his father possibly could be. Kim Jung-Un has been exposed to guys like Asaad in Syria, he was also raised during a time when he saw what happened when people like Ghadaffi and Hussien were toppled from power and executed by the people and he will do everything to avoid that.
Feeding the number two man to dogs is an execution to encourage others to fall in line behind him. I'm sure that he didn't need 300 other senior party officials to supervise, he wanted 300 party officials to watch and understand that you are a simple denunciation from a horrible painful death.
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