*sighs* So NK is doubling down? Well, if that's the case, and they do fire those missiles, well, we might not be seeing a NK much longer.
There's no "might" about it in nuclear warfare. Despite North Korea's intent to use the nuclear threat to force other nations to do their bidding, they don't seem to realize that other nations don't respond well to nukes. They've escalated this far beyond what anyone with any bit of sanity would do. Maybe they looked at the Middle East and were afraid that the US was going to spontaneously invade, but that's still not a nuclear problem. But they're escalating it into one, and the US will never use nukes unless the other side does first.
The reason the US and USSR didn't go to war was because neither side would use nuclear weapons unless the others did (or the others decided to invade in a conventional ground war). So they were angry and pointing things at each other a lot, but no actual shooting went on outside of a few isolated incidents and proxy wars. The thing is, each side was roughly equal in power. Equal enough that a nuclear shooting match would turn the world into a radioactive fireball. North Korea's only got a few nuclear ICBMs at the most, and they're probably not very reliable or long ranged. North Korea can't hit very many targets and they stand a good chance of their missiles being intercepted as soon as they cross over Japanese, South Korea, or American airspace. On the other hand, the US WILL respond to a nuclear attack with nukes of their own, and the B-2s (among other planes) can carry them. We can literally wipe out the entire upper half of the peninsula before they realize what's going on.
In short, North Korea's doing very, very stupid things. Even if they think that they're right in trying to defend themselves from American or South Korean invasion, using nuclear weapons is opening up a can of worms that they're not prepared to handle. They could have avoided problems by backing down, but now they're continuing to escalate until everyone's got their fingers on a hair trigger and all the guns are pointed at the DPRK.
