If war actually does break out, then that really suggests that we've pushed North Korea too far. We've backed them up into a corner. I've long wondered if they would actually strike Seoul in a final desperation strike because that just seems like a waste.

I tried putting myself in Kim's shoes, and I quickly came up with an alternate plan: don't attack Seoul or Tokyo (or Guam)— attack Russia. That is, attack Vladivostok. It's located not far from the North Korean border.

I wrote this months ago:

My view is that this is because the Pentagon has probably long known what I recently figured out— North Korea won't attack the US or South Korea.
They're going to attack Russia.
 
I said pointed this out a while ago, that the North Koreans know they're doomed. They lack the technological capability to reach their trillions of dollars worth of resources lying beneath their feet, and they refuse to bow to the West or even the East in order to procure the technology needed because they know that they will be forced to liberalize their society and reveal to the world what they've been doing to their own people.

Eventually, they will fall. And it probably won't come through an internal revolution but instead an outside-orchestrated coup, and it'll be done over the issue of nuclear weapons. It'll either be America or China who does it.
 
I genuinely believe that the North Korean elite oppose the West and that they sincerely do wish to overthrow neoliberalism. But I don't believe they're so psychotic as society says they are, mad to the point that they'll throw everything away just to attack South Korea and Japan for a brief moment in time.
 
There's a much easier way, a way that can actually lead to the destruction of the West (and possibly the entire world), and that way is by attacking Russia.
 
 
People who think it makes no sense simply don't know history. As recently as 1995, there was a nuclear scare where Boris Yeltsin had unlocked the nuclear briefcase to start World War III— and why? Because of a Norwegian research rocket. In 2002, during the tensest part of the Indo-Pakistan crisis, a meteor exploded over the Mediterranean with the force of the Hiroshima bomb. Had it entered our atmosphere just a few hours earlier, it would've kickstarted a nuclear war between the two nations.
 
And why? Because when you see a missile heading for your country and it's going to land in 20 minutes, or if you detect a massive explosion followed by an unusually huge mushroom cloud over one of your cities, you don't get the privilege of sitting behind a chair eating Doritos imagining such scenarios or how irrational making nuclear decisions might be; you have to make serious choices in just a few seconds.
 
The Russian port city of Vladivostok is located just a stone's throw from the North Korean border. It wouldn't take much effort to position a submarine in the area and launch a missile at such an angle that it looks like it came from a more distant location. 
 
And this is where things differ from the likes of the Norwegian rocket incident or Able Archer 23— there's an actual detonation. Russian radar operators' eyes will boggle when they see a missile shooting for Vladivostok, but they obviously won't believe it's anything serious considering how many false alarms there have been in history. Nowadays, you're supposed to assume it's a false alarm unless all reasonable doubt has been cleared. 

And all reasonable doubt dies with a nuclear explosion. They only need one; they can launch conventional or even dummy missiles to trick radar operators further inland; once the explosion has occurred, the Russian military basically has only one option: launch everything. There's no more "wait and see" because a city has just been obliterated by a nuclear warhead. And it looks like there are dozens, if not hundreds more on the way— as cash strapped as North Korea is, a dummy missile doesn't cost anywhere near as much as an actual nuclear warhead. And you can't tell the difference when it's in flight.
 
So that's it. These are nuclear missiles to you, and you have to respond within 30 seconds. There's no time to think, and you already (think you) know they're nukes because one of your country's cities has been destroyed. It's easy to be rational when it's not happening to you, but that just won't happen if it ever does.

The DPRK didn't need to develop thousands of nukes; they just needed to trick one of the major nuclear states to attack the other.
I believe there's a Russian saying that the method the poor and weak uses to overcome the rich and powerful is always trickery.
 
And I think that's why USica is starting to freak out over North Korea more than usual— they need only one or two good miniaturized warheads and an electric submarine to hold them.
That, and Donald Trump is just like the rest of us at the end of the day. We're all fed stories about how evil the Norks are; Trump's heard these same stories. It makes sense he'd come into office with that mindset and not the ones that the government has, a mindset that's likely more sober and realistic than anything you're going to hear on the MSM.