"Our military will not sit idle until warmongers launch a pre-emptive strike," said an unidentified KCNA military commentator. "Everything will be in ashes, not just a sea of fire, if our advanced pre-emptive strike once begins."
You see, the Pillsbury Nuke Boy likes holding South Korean civilians hostage. Extorting money is tough without a credibel threat to kill South Koreans. And even though North Korea's army is wasting away through neglect, they still have lots of artillery in range of Seoul which could slaughter civilians with high explosives or poison gas. This killing option rather than nukes has always been the North's trump card.
The interesting problem for the South Koreans is that if they really want to stop North Korea from killing southern civilians, they can't restrict themselves to just countering the nukes. North Korean conventional weapons are fully capable of turning Seoul into ashes, even if the North is losing the ability to invade.
Yet the testimony relating to nukes indicates the ROK military seems to be thinking about how to protect their people. Logically, this should mean that the ROK military is looking at how they could launch a narrow offensive north of the DMZ to clear out PDRK guns and rockets from a relatively shallow band of territory that threaten Seoul.
So I guess that it is understandable that the North went all batty. After years of assuming they can threaten Seoul at will, the power imbalance is finally shifting so much that the ROK military may be thinking about how to attack north for a buffer zone to protect their capital.
The killing option is shifting and the communists of Pyongyang know it.
