Victor Davis Hanson, writing at Townhall, discusses what might happen in response to the North Korean threat of nuclear war. He includes this, the last of four possible scenarios:

Preemption. Barring the “peaceful” options of defanging nuclear North Korea, the U.S. and its Japanese and South Korean allies would have to disable the missiles through military force.

Such a nightmarish action would not be limited to “surgical strikes”. Instead, it would have to include massive attacks on North Korean missile sites, command and control centers, artillery and missile platforms, military bases and WMD repositories.

Such preemption would quickly escalate to a general-theater war – or worse.

But would it necessarily? And what would be worse?

Last-gasp North Korean nukes might escape preemptive bombing and be launched at Japan, South Korea, America’s Pacific bases and the U.S. West Coast.

A tottering North Korea could order a full-fledged artillery pounding of Seoul, chemical and cyber attacks, and a conventional ground invasion of South Korea.

The U.S. and its allies would win such a war. But the cost could be catastrophic and prompt global recession.

Why would it precipitate a global recession?

No one knows what China would do in such an exigency. Would it merely cry crocodile tears while its troublesome patron disappeared? Or to save its last communist client, would China send troops into the peninsula as it did in the fall of 1950?

One thing is always certain. The naive architects of appeasement who watch as monsters grow always win short-term praise for avoiding immediate war. Their realist successors, who are forced to cage or destroy such full-grown beasts, are usually labeled as war mongers. 

Yes, and in these days of civilizational despair, labels terrify people more than death. 

It may well be the case that the Western mind is now so set against war, against the killing it involves, that it will not defend itself. Not, anyway, by a preemptive strike.

What then? No one offers scenarios or prophecies of what will happen if Kim Jong-un is not disarmed.