North Korea: Life (or Death) Imitates Art?

In the recent movies "Red Dawn" and "Olympus Has Fallen", they depict the United States being attacked by North Koreans.  At the time these films were made, Hollywood executives (and most of the rest of us) must have figured the country was too small and remote to be anything more than a nuisance.  Besides, they made great stand-ins for the Chinese, a real military and economic superpower that neither the U.S. government nor Hollywood could afford to offend.

Now we have a situation where those cheesy movies just might have stumbled onto the truth.  Kim Jong-Un, North Korea's current "Dear Leader", has been hollering about breaking his country's 60-year armistice with its southern neighbors, threatening to throw nuclear weapons at South Korea and the United States unless economic sanctions are lifted and a peace treaty is negotiated.  Though the fighting ended in 1953, the two sides have never really let down their guards.

Foreign policy experts and U.S. government officials have noted that Kim, who only recently took power upon the death of Kim Jong-Il and is believed to be around 30 years old, is just doing this to convince his own people what a big man he is.  Also, Kim's predecessors have always said stuff like this whenever the U.S. and South Korea holds joint military exercises every spring.  Only this time. Kim's rhetoric is a bit more ominous than usual.

These same experts have taken pains to assure us that none of North Korea's missiles will get anywhere near the U.S. mainland, despite Kim's allegedly having a "hit list" of American cities he'd love to destroy.  They just don't have the technology for it, we're told.  Really?  There's probably a lot more to North Korea's military and the number of missiles they have than the "experts" are aware of, or are willing to share with the public.  To that end, the Obama White House has said it will increase the number of anti-missile systems on the West Coast over the next few years, just in case.

South Korea has remade itself since the war into one of the world's leading economies, helped along in part by America's continuing military presence there.  Should war come, that Samsung smartphone you have in your hand and that Hyundai car you're driving could become collectors' items.  And the International Olympic Committee had better have a backup plan ready in case South Korea is unable to host the 2018 Winter Games.  The Korean peninsula would become a mass graveyard.

The presence of China as North Korea's BFF serves as a deterrent to Americans' desire to reduce Pyongyang to rubble.  They'd either rather see Korean reunification on their terms, or keep things the way they are.  But even China seems to have problems controlling what Kim says or does.

The longer this thing goes on, the more likely it is that something or somebody could make a mistake that crosses the line into a war that could involve the planet.  Kim Jong-Un and his fellow countrymen and women may soon find that, unlike in the movies, suicide is not painless.