Why? N. Korea may well be interested in a bomb that kills people and doesn't destroy infrastructure (much). Think of South Korea. With neutron bombs they could clear it out and then move in and take it over without having to rebuild. The residual radiation from a neutron bomb doesn't last very long and doesn't result in much if any cancer down the road. It's a much "smarter" weapon to use in every way, unless your goal is complete obliteration for psychological reasons.

I doubt they could successfully build one. It's a way more complex design. It takes an enormous amount of tritium, which has a very short half-life (something like 14 years). It's a weapon that has an enormous upkeep cost. It's not practical for them to even attempt. We ditched our neutron bomb designs for the reasons of upkeep. They have shit for shelf life.

Not to mention, the only effect they are getting out of their current nuke test is a psychological one. The odds that their nukes are actually deliverable is very low. The more I information I read about this, the more it looks like their test was mostly a failure..

We're in a bad place relative to N. Korea right now. Ideally, everyone would have moved out of Seoul over the past couple decades so we could attack N. Korea without worrying about all the civilians in Seoul dying immediately. As it stands, we're stuck between sacrificing Seoul now but preventing DPRK from getting massively nuked up or waiting to see if something better comes along. I'm not optimistic.

Attacking North Korea isn't an option. Causing them to collapse, or rather letting them collapse, is an option... If China's cut off all aid, it would be very easy to make the regime collapse. It can't support itself. The aid from China is the only thing keeping the DPRK alive.

Of course, if aid from China was actually cut, it's a tossup as to wether Kim would see the writing on the wall and launch attacks on Seoul and Japan in an effort to get aid flowing again before a coup could occur.. And if a successful coup did occur, it's unknown how likely the new leader(s) would be to do the same thing.

When North Korea goes down, it will go down from within.. It's all a matter of if it strikes at the outside world on its way down... And what the situation following it's collapse looks like.

RE: Reuters | N.Korea nuke test relatively small: scientists