Thanks again, Harry Truman for not letting MacArthur finish the job. We're technically at war with these cretins. A ground war with NK would make Somme look like a family picnic.
Might have been helpful if MacArthur hadn't incompetently ignored numerous warnings of Chicom troops being in North Korea before that.
These numbers are based on conventional warfare. Kim says he is nuclear so he just put the genie on the playing field. We will not attack him. If we can get an effective sanctions program (that means China and Russia on board) as his regime collapses there is a high probability he could attack South Korea.
We would be fools to play by his rules of conventional warfare. Take the invading troops out with battle field nukes and the infrastructure that supports their army. Also small yield (not city busters) nukes on all suspected nuclear development and or storage sites in the North.
I do not think any president, even a democrat president, would stand by and see 50,000 US troops killed and perhaps a million or more South Koreans. We would launch!
If we have command of the air, their tanks will be stacked up, more or less like what would have happened if the Reds had actually come through Fulda Gap.