Response to bungled NK attack?

[caraher]

Reading a piece on new intelligence regarding possible integration of a nuclear warhead onto a missile by North Korea made me wonder what the likely, and the appropriate, responses might be to a bungled nuclear strike.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) released a classified assessment last month saying that it now has “moderate confidence” that the “North currently has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles however the reliability will be low..."

So in the event that the North Korean leadership is as stupid/suicidal as those promoting this threat would have us believe, the most likely outcome of any attempt to take a swing at US territory might be a miss (whether because of an inaccurate missile or malfunctioning warhead). It strikes me that, were this to happen, it would be even harder to figure out what response would be appropriate than if the attack took a heavy toll. Were the North Koreans to kill a lot of Americans, Obama would be able to justify just about any kind of military response he saw fit to make, at least in terms of public and world opinion.

It's less clear, however, what kind of military response to an ineffectual attack would seem appropriate. In some ways, it might tend to undercut all the hype about the threat and make doing anything drastic seem even less appropriate. On the other hand, such an unquestionably belligerent act certainly would remove any doubt about their intentions, and nobody would expect the US simply to wait quietly while North Korea developed a more mature capability for a future strike.

I also wonder how all this would interact with the deployment of similarly-unreliable ballistic missile defenses. If there were an attack and the defenses seemed to work, what then? Would that suggest less of an imperative to do anything aggressive to stop future attacks?

It's all very tricky to sort out. We get news stories about the North Korea threat, including the one I linked that purports to tell how intelligence is figuring out North Korean capabilities (and which reinforces the idea that the threat is genuine). It's hard to take these stories at face value after the 2002-2003 Iraq war buildup, even if we no longer have the Bush crew in charge. And we also have defensive weapon systems being rushed into place that themselves have a dubious track record. If North Korea launched a missile at Guam or Alaska or the west coast and it wound up in the drink, I don't think we'd have any good way of knowing what really happened - a fizzle or a successful intercept. I do wonder which spin would be considered more favorable to the military-industrial complex - that's the one I'd expect to hear, regardless of the truth.