Wild card as in we won't know what kinds of things that military is capable of and what sort of startegy they employ.
You always have to think of the worst possibility when it comes to dictatorship's military.
North Korea was damn lucky they even acquired the materials needed to MAKE nuclear weapons because China is, like, it's only friend.
It's extremely surprising North Korea ever got nuclear weapons. If you did what NK did, shutting its door to the outside world, and then expect to be able to perform extremely complex scientific experiments with no help from nations that could help with nuclear development like the U.S. or Israel, no wonder so many tests have been failing.
However, if it does happen, America would absolutely crush North Korea in a war, and only one nuclear attack would come from North Korea because of that.
Likely, twelve nuclear missiles would be fired: one at Seoul, Daegu, Gwangju, Ulsan, Busan, Incheon, Suwon, and probably one at Tokyo, Osaka, Kumamoto, and Kagoshima. This would literally cripple the two countries' economies for the next few years.
And then the U.S. would retaliate and there would no longer be a north korea.
I would say that NK sending a nuclear device and successfully striking Tokyo would be indefinitely worse than 9/11.
of course. The thermonuclear weapons developed nowadays are said to be
ten times more powerful than the bombs dropped on HIroshima and Nagasaki; i believe in Hiroshima alone over 80,000 people were killed; also, there are a lot more people per square mile in these countries than there were in 1945.
But as you can see, as far as conventional warfare goes, the US is still #1 (of course). NK is 25th, lol.
These statistics actually seem to be rather flawed. According to Wikipedia, the United States has
less than 2,000,000 active personnel.
This list seems to be pretty bogus and rather ignorant of the fact that manpower
does matter.
It's good that it's up-to-date, however. China just finished building its first domestically built aircraft carrier last week.
Anyone who knows anything about the military, like me, knows this list is complete crap. For example, the list is lacking APCs, number of airbases, % of gdp spent on military, # of overseas bases, # of conscriptable men and women aged 18-49, etc., etc.
Another indication that this list is flawed is that it says that "active reserve personnel" is listed in the total manpower; however, North Korea and South Korea are placed
under Vietnam, while in reality, their total manpower is above Vietnam.
Of course, the $ "GDP spent" statistic is flawed. Not everyone has many billions of GDP to spend like United States does. As
MyNameisHobby
stated, North Korea spends "15%" of their GDP on the military, yet this is only $10,000,000,000.
Also,
I live in Canada. I have extensively studied the Canadian military. I know that Canada takes U.S. designs (such as the M16) and just randomly names it the Diemaco C8 and pretends it's a completely new rifle. I also know that the active personal statistic here is actually 68,000. Not 140,000. Not even close. That's
double the actual amount. Get a better chart.
Want to know what countries to actually worry about? Russia and China. Russia
actually has the guts to invade people. Look what they did in the Ukraine. What might have been another minor war turned out to be simply an invasion by the Russians that noone did anything about.
Also, one last note: the missile that
Venus of the Desert Bloom
mentioned actually had an operational radius of 1200 mi. It crashed into the Sea of Japan not sixty miles from the Russian coast.
Stop worrying about NK. Worry about China and Russia.
NK will not use nuclear weapons unless attacked first.