How should America respond to North Korea?

Personally, IMHO, I believe we have to ask ourselves: how do you respond to a dictator, a tyrant who lives in luxury while so many of his people actually starve to death, who has exhibited mental issues but is in control of weapons of mass destruction and has threatened to use them against us?

If a man is holding a gun - not yet pointed directly at you - and threatens to shoot you, do you stand there and wait for him to actually shoot before you defend yourself? What if you know for a fact that he has had numerous people killed (or has allowed them to die by depriving them and their families of enough food to survive)? Knowing he has no respect for life, even of his own people?

Certainly in such a case you would be justified in defending yourself, in shooting at him in an attempt to stop him from possibly killing you. Some people would still wait for him to actually fire first, saying they could not know for certain that he would actually shoot. Some would refuse to shoot even then, as they refuse to take a life themselves, even at the cost of their own.

What if he is aiming the gun at your family? At your friends? At people you love and respect? At people you are responsible for protecting (as with a police officer, or a soldier)?

Here, just yesterday, a deranged man killed twenty-four innocent people while in church, in a small town in Texas. If you saw a man armed with a gun going toward a church - or a school, or any place where a large number of people were congregated - would you attempt to stop him, even shoot him if he wouldn't stop? You would certainly would be justified in such an incident.

So, let's get to the meat of this thing. If the mentally unbalanced dictator of a country who has no problem at all causing the deaths of large numbers of his own people threatens to kill millions - perhaps even 90% (288,000,000) of the people living in America, do you take him seriously? Since it _might_ be impossible to stop his weapons from killing Americans by the hundreds of millions, do you wait until he launches?

This creature did NOT say that he would launch his weapons if attacked. He threatened to launch them because he _claims_ we threatened to attack him first, which obviously isn't true. He then proved he is capable of doing so, by virtue of nuclear weapon tests he has already accomplished, and by publishing technical information (“The EMP Might Of Nuclear Weapons”) which indicates his scientists know exactly how to do what he is threatening to do - launch "Super-EMP" (Electro Magnetic Pulse) weapons at our country.

I'm not going to go into why such an attack would be so devastating, so deadly that it could end of killing up to 90% of us here in America. You can "google" information about these weapons and their effects, or - if you would rather read some excellent fiction, a story about what might happen, you can check out Matt Bracken's tale, "Alas, Brave New Babylon", in his book,  The Bracken Anthology, available for $2.99 at Kindle.