Nuke Kim to educate Ahmadinejad. If Kim is kind enough to provide the casus belli (or more precisely, casus foederis), it could work nicely.

Anyhow, why pollute the environment with a small nuclear war when it could be prevented using this nice gizmo on the sole Kim (and Ahmadinejad too, to prevent further troubles)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steyr_IWS_2000

No, no, no, no!

Let's just stick with the nuke.

LOL, if really USA were invaded by North Korea they'd just have to die for shame before being actually harmed.

However, with North Korea nonexistent economy margins, it would be enough to take down some major infrastructures and utilities to crush it completely. There would be a massive exodus to China to escape from famine and epidemics and this would stop Chinese economy from being a threat to the Western one for at least 20 years. There would be an exodus to South Korea too, but its economy would be an acceptable casualty and the Japanese would actually enjoy one dangerous competitor less.

Joking right? Assasinating them would make problems worse, especially in Iran. Iran has a grass roots progressive movement, it's best left alone if it's to flourished. In N.Korea assassinating Kim Jong Il would lead to certain war and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths.

When I was at E3, there were tons of PR stunts by the developers of Homefront. One of the stunts was a fake grouping of Korean soldiers under the DPRK flag, standing near the South Hall.

I looked at them for about 10 seconds, and had to force myself from not laughing. None of them look like the real, malnourished Koreans of today.

Here is what each soldier looks like, today:

This is a classic realpolitik reasoning, similar to what prevented France and UK from having Hitler killed asap. And guess what? Things just kept on going worse and at the end of WWII half Europe was given to Stalin (that actually initially planned to share it with Hitler, before Hitler's folly screwed up their plan, and was never punished for this, he eventually grabbed what he wanted with UK and USA permission instead).

So an assassination, even with its worst consequences, would just be a lesser bad. In Iran's case it would be necessary to kill the most integralist ayatollahs too, leaving alive the moderate ones, and obviously also the highest ranking pasdaran officers, so a well organized conspiracy would be necessary. But in North Korea, Kim's death would at the very least bring the limited positive effects of Stalin's death in the former USSR.

Stalin wasn't assassinated. Kim Jong Ils natural death (which probably isn't far off) will hopefully be good for N.Korea, assassination almost certainly wouldn't be, it would be a very legitimate casus belli.

Also you think there would be any moderate ayatollahs left after you assassinate half of them? They'll all become radicals.

The thing is, Kim Jong-Il is completely benign and actually pretty laughable. Nobody takes anything he says seriously because under his leadership, North Korea is a poor country with failing infrastructure and an army enormous in size, but with pathetic funding. Every so often, he'll grumble about firing a nuclear missile, but he never will.

Any successors he may have can hardly be more harmless than the crazy old man who leads the country today.

And you can hardly compare him to Stalin. Stalin ruled the second most powerful nation in the world with an iron fist, and tolerated no rebellion or resistance of any kind. People feared him. More than that, people respected him. Kim Jong-Il rules a small poor country with a failing economy, and more people laugh at him than anything else. I can't imagine anyone laughing at Stalin if he said he would use nuclear missiles on the United States.

South Korea would Zergling rush them before they even have the chance to set up nukes :P

watching this closely, this could be big