Regarding North Korea the situation becomes more irretrievable. They have an army of people analysing the situation and the possible consequences, economic and social, such action would cause. There is no real basis for such a decision as you have written. I do not believe it will bring any radical change in the situation. The question is, what are the possible repercussions of direct action? Have they any idea of what they are dealing with? Are the North Koreans actually capable of self defence that poses a threat to many or is it simply a ruse? It is only the start of a larger and increasing problem and it will not go away no matter what is done in an attempt to eradicate it. You cannot continually control it through pressure. You cannot continually bomb or starve those into submission. You can only deal with it by looking at the cause behind it. You cannot continually exterminate a cause, an ideal, a hope, a dream. Not unless you begin to eliminate those who are responsible and to do that you will have to eliminate hundreds, thousands if not millions of people. Are we prepared to wrest it from others and are we prepared to die to do so? Surely, in a free world, each country has a just and rightful claim to such weapons? What gives us the right to say "you cannot have a weapon" and are we so sure that we would not use such a weapon if our survival depended upon it and then rationalise its use?

Regarding the point you raised, North Korea sees it as an injustice and looks upon it as persecution and a systematic attempt to destroy North Korea. They operate from their own doctrines and such ideas engender an unjustified optimism which fails to foresee their own weaknesses. Their inflexible conviction of their own superiority prevents them from seeing the basic facts that they could lose any offensive. The loss of contact with reality can affect the very life and death of a nation and at times overshadows anything we can try to do or pre-empt. The North Koreans may have lost touch with reality and their arrogance can distort their view of the situation to an unreal one and could lead to many harmful decisions. What makes it fatal is their rigidity, their inability to change, to adapt to reality. Such rigidity keeps reality from moderating the excesses of feeling which can reign unstinted. Such blind over estimation of their own strength and their perception of others could lead them to collide with reality and the effect could be damaging and disastrous. The views I express are not necessarily my own views. You asked me to look at the situation from the viewpoint of the North Koreans and this I have attempted to do.