Maybe someone already responded- but you did read the part where “it would take 15 minutes”?
Truly an expensive quarter hour, but much better millions of North Koreans than US, S Korean Japanese or other millions. I pity the millions of NORKS who would bekilled/maimed and displaced while there foolish and insane leadership runs them through the gauntlet of nuclear defense strikes... The winds blow east ward over the N Pacific/Arctic, so well delivered air bursting nukes would be rather mundane for the rest of the world- fallout would be minimal.
We are not actively seeking to bother DPRK, so why have they been/are swearing to toss random nukes into our countryside?
Liberty, even in our distressed condition, is a threat to totalitarianism everywhere....
And we’d probably want to send in scads of smartbombs too, to try to minimize the incoming to Seoul from Norkieland.
If Seoul is not civil defense minded by now — in the way that we were during the bad old days of the Cold War — it never will be. It needs to be able to hole up at a minute’s notice.
Nukes, even airbursts, create fallout.
And not all the nukes would be airbursts; the Norks have some of the deepest bunkers in the world. When Saddam Hussein was building his command bunker, he consulted with the Norks.
So how do you think all the nations downwind from North Korea are going to respond? How will the South Koreans feel about us nuking their relatives? And do we really want a United Korea sharing a border with the PRC?