The answers to my questions I’d put to the Pentagon planners would likely mean, if I were POTUS, I’d not make a “preemptive” strike.
Why?
Question one would be: How much would a preemptive strike be able to render North Korea unawares and totally surprised before it was too late?
Question two would be: How total would the strike be effective in achieving against the North Korean ability to respond?
Question three would be: Can such a strike be done without a North Korean response rendering a good part of the metropolitan area of Seoul into a pile of rubble?
Question four would be: Can it be done such that North Korea would be rendered incapable of attempting a land war against South Korea in response? (In other words, even if you could TOTALLY take out all North Korean nuclear arms and missile units, could and would they still mount a land war in response?)
I have some imagination of what the Pentagon planners responses would be. My guess is they would not produce extremely good answers to those questions, and huge losses in Seoul and still reigniting full scale conventional war could still be possible outcomes of “successful” decapitation of North Korea’s nuclear arms abilities.
I think the Pentagon planners understand that the situation is NOT like anytime when we tried “limited strikes” against Saddam Hussein to take out “just” his WMD programs. The whole contexts of North Korea and Iraq are not the same sets of conditions. The possible repercussions of anything less than “total success” and even partial success are very different than ever was the case with Iraq.
If all that means “no” to a preemptive strike, that also means war, and destruction in Seoul still could come by a different set of circumstances.
It may in fact be a difficult moral choice as to - when all is done and over - which is in fact the “more moral” choice. I’m personally glad I won’t have to make it. I’d probably go from already mostly white hair to bald.