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KCNA, the North's state news agency and a mouthpiece of the regime, said the situation on the peninsula was now "so alarming that a nuclear war may break out at any moment."

Translation: we can no longer feed the army and they're preparing to revolt. Our oil stocks are declining to the point where we will soon no longer be able to drive a tank down the street. We hope you believe we will commit nuclear suicide and take the South with us if you don't give us the oil and the food and let us make nukes to sell to terror states.

Japan is ready to hit the North if they even start to fuel a missile. I don't think the North has nuclear artillery so they have to drop a bomb from a jet or a missile. I suspect we've got spy satellites watching them every second and the Japanese are using our satellite feed to keep watch. While it has not been reported, I suspect Japan's defense forces are constantly on patrol off the coast, ready to hit.

The incursion by the jet is just an intimidation tactic as is the talk of imminent nuclear war.

China is also very opposed to nuclearization of the Korean peninsula or Japan. So the North is making them unhappy. And Japan announced a few weeks ago that some weapons-grade plutonium somehow can't be accounted for under their nuclear control procedures. Hmmm, now just where did that plutonium go, surely not into a couple of tactical nukes under Japanese control...

Translation: we can no longer feed the army and they're preparing to revolt. Our oil stocks are declining to the point where we will soon no longer be able to drive a tank down the street.

North Korea has somewhere around four thousand tanks, most of them in the T-54s family, either in storage or in various states of disrepair. They also field some T-34s, and T-62s, and a handful of better tanks. They haven't had enough fuel to do good training with them for more than a decade. (To say nothing of their air force, which trains at 30% or so of the South Koreans)

They don't have the reserves to train, much less to carry the fight South for long, and I wouldn't want to be within 20 miles of a NK oil storage depot after hostilities commence. Their conventional strength atrophies further with every passing year.