The United States believes that the collapse of the North Korean regime is far more likely to come to pass than a full scale attack by North Korea on either South Korea, or the USA. And that’s actually a slightly more terrifying scenario, because the tightly controlled regime would in all likelihood loose control of its nuclear armaments.

Paul McLeary of Defense News wrote:

The Unified Quest war game conducted this year by Army planners posited the collapse of a nuclear-armed, xenophobic, criminal family regime that had lorded over a closed society and inconveniently lost control over its nukes as it fell.

But the war games did not go smoothly.

It took 56 days for the U.S. to flow two divisions’ worth of soldiers into the failed nuclear-armed state of “North Brownland” and as many as 90,000 troops to deal with the country’s nuclear stockpiles, a major U.S. Army war game concluded this winter.

Generals told reporters that there would be a few problems that the US military would face, were they to move in to a collapsed DPRK.

Firstly, it would be difficult to establish Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance in the closed kingdom of North Korea. Generals involved agreed to move blind without establishing an information structure.

Secondly, the nuclear centres are in and amongst civilization. Protecting those civilians takes care and more personnel.

A report released in 2009 on potential regime change in North Korea concluded that accelerations in North Korea’s  nuclear program “makes the cost of mishandling a possible collapse so high that all contingencies must be planned.”

[Source: Business Insider]