SH - No argument about the fanaticism, although it did not serve Imperial Nipon all that well in the long run. There's a loverly (albeit un-PC) line in The Sand Pebbles, "Who's afraid of a million gooks on the wrong side of eight machine guns?"
It would be a very nasty war, to be sure, but there is simply no way North Korea could win it conventionally. It is, in my opinion, very unlikely that they would get the massive PRC support they got in the 50s - there has been a seachange in Chinese attitudes and they have too much to lose on the economic front.
What is really scares me is their NBCR arsenal. The western media has beaten alarm bells right and left about their nukes, but few have mentioned what by some accounts is a very strong CBW capability, especially the former. One scenario if His Shortness dies or gets sidelined somehow is a balkanization of North Korea, resulting in maybe a dozen Kim-style warlords, each with his own bottled death.
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