“But I doubt they have very many missiles...and none which can reach CONUS.”
I’ve read the North can put a million artillery shells per hour into Soul. And, as satisfying as a nuclear strike might seem to some, the genie has been back in the bottle 68 years. Using nukes will represent a sea change and there are many more nukes around than you’d imagine. The real fear of nukes isn’t that they’ll be launched from countries, which will give us the return address, but that they’ll be assembled in the US and we won’t know where they came from. Non-state actors will probably have nukes shortly, if they don’t already. Chinese warlords, Russian robber barons and Pakistani militants are only some of the actors with potential access to nukes. Also, don’t forget a conventional bomb salted with nuclear material could potentially render millions of acres uninhabitable. What if they did it to New York? This is why we need a blustering crazy-seeming badass in the White House stomping around in cowboy boots and mispronouncing nuclear; somebody with “no understanding of the subtleties of diplomacy.”