Miscalculation is the actual problem, risk, danger with this bouncing baby boy Kim and his whole gang of parochial and subservient big hats.

Kim and Co know they can't deliberately and willfully starting something big and come out of it intact. They might survive in their bunkers - might survive - but they also know the glass parking lot they'd come out into. They know that either way they'd lose it all.

So they're not knowingly going to start something big.

It's almost always miscalculation that gets these brinkmanship types of dictators into serious trouble. In 1939 Hitler joked about who would start a war over Poland but it turned out to have been him. Yet Hitler had got away with the Sudetenland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and other obvious territorial grabs of ethnic areas or countries.

Everything I've seen and heard recently expresses an increasing concern that Pyongyang keeps upping the ante as the Six-Party Talks countries get tougher and Pyongyang in return gets more strident. (The US, ROK, Japan, Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang). The US confidentially has been negotiating one-on-one with Pyongyang for more than a year but has got nowhere in the discussion format Pyongyang had been all but screaming for for years.

Kim's execution of his uncle has signaled a violent and thorough purge of anyone in the regime who is or might be pro-Beijing and favorable toward the Deng Xiao Peng stage of reforms. CCP-PRC president Xi Jinping already had regarded the Kim kid as impetuous, erratic, immature but now has begun to see Kim as violently hostile towards Beijing.

Pyongyang has repeatedly stiffed Moscow to the point that one of Putin's direct mouthpieces to the outside world, Aleksandr Zhebin of the Russian Institute for Korean Studies, wrote in October that North Korea often acted in the past without regard for Russian interests and that this is happening again with its nuclear and missile programs - that these processes are creating a crises atmosphere between Moscow and Pyongyang that almost approaches the intensity the Cuban missile crisis, which is certainly a bright a red flag to any (and every) foreign government.

Pyongyang has only had supporters, never any friends. It seems that now it's losing its supporters. The new trend line is a cause of considerable new concern.

http://thediplomat.com/2013/12/the-significance-of-russias-frustration-with-north-korea/

Thank you for an excellent version of events displayed in a logical and thoughtful manner. Can we get back to laughing at Kim?

Seoul is 35 miles from the border, so I think that last thing anyone wants to do is to start threatening to turn its car parks into glass.

I'm fairly certain South Korea has a stack of standard pre-written responses to the North's occasional dummy spitting.

There's a good sized river running thru Seoul. It comes out of N.Korea, where it's dammed at the border. Tubby could open the sluice gates, and..... Seoul is swamped.