That’s literally my point. Everyone, including them, knows they’d lose and the gravy train would stop. There is no way they’d ever do a premature attack. It’s insane.
Well the kicker is that the North Korean foreign policy is predicated on them trying to appear as insane as possible to other people, without really being actually too insane. And maybe ironically, not really an act that any sane person want to play or be a part of.
But the people involved literally don't have a choice. What do you think their alternative is? Let it be, go home, take a beer out of the fridge, lay down on the sofa, watch some football and call it a day? That's not how the life of those generals looks like.
Easy to claim what "a sane person" would do from the arrogant POV of a western average citizen, but reality looks very different.
Their defense policy is the same as the US: don't attack, else you risk slagging of your city/ies. This is the core of MAD. You don't maintain MAD by not promising you are going to shoot back.
Soviet generals were all for a war with the US at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis even though they knew they'd come off very badly. I don't think there was anything unusually irrational about them - people just do crazy things in situations like that.
Because they thought the US would nuke them first.
And from what i read there we're enough crazy generals who wanted to exactly do that during the cold war.
