I think China recognizes that no matter what happens, NK is going to 'spill out' onto them. The DMZ has enough troops on each side to make it a pretty difficult place to cross if you are a starving refugee. That will put most of the pressure on the Chinese border. What would China do with say 250K starving refugees who crossed the border?

It took a mighty long time for the Romanians to kick out their dictator; ditto for the blacks in south Africa to punt Apartheid - while I hope the NK people can do it themselves, I don't think it's plausible anytime in the next decade or so.

But certainly, _anything_ that happens there has to have at least the tacit approval of the Chinese. This could be an opportunity to build a collegial relationship with China & maybe avoid another USSR-style "us vs. them" cold war mentality...

If the regime change does succeed, the next gate is if nukes are launched during the struggle. This could be by orders of Kim, fanatics in the government, by accident, etc. A single Hiroshima nuke on Soul, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo or Taipei would change the Asian dynamics for a generation. You can't discount the human response of turning over the table when faced with an unwinnable situation.

The last gate would be if the government that replaces the regime would keep or destroy the nukes. I think that they would most likely destroy the nukes as a means of getting outside help to rebuild Korea. A puppet regime for China wouldn't need them. A south Korea merger (ala east and west Germany) would potentially like to keep them, but would be vulnerable to the economic dislocation of a Japanese and American sanction. If just these two countries refused to allow imports from Korea or of goods that contain parts from Korea, the Korean economy would go into a deep depression. As much as the south Korea government might like to have nukes because of it's 'tough neighborhood', they wouldn't pay that price. An independent north Korea regime change government would give up the nukes in a heartbeat as a small price to get US aid.

An Iraq-style invasion is all but off the table, President Bush’s strong talk notwithstanding, and really has been ever since it became evident in the run-up to the Iraq war that the DPRK had nuclear weapons.

This is not the time for saying that Bush is weak on defense. Any exposure of Bush's weakness will harden the resolve of the evil-doers.

I see no reason, however, for a coup to guarantee that the nuclear program would cease to be. Many of the logics for wanting the weapons would remain in place.

I believe the idea is that a pro-china communist party in North Korea would get the same protections from China that Japan and South Korea get from the US, so that North Korea wouldn't feel that it needed it's own nuclear weapons program for defense. Also not having a batshit crazy megalomaniac in charge might help.

North Korea's recent blast was tiny, but its commitment to nuclear weapons is long.

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