North Korea - a serious threat to America?

This is something that's been going back and forth, back and forth over the past few years but in recent months has been going forth more than before.
I've been hearing some opinions about this sort of thing and there's a lot of bullshit surrounding it.

Common scare talk: North Korea's going to have the ability to launch a nuclear missile at the United States soon. We need to go to war NOW! ("We" often said by a person who is not a member of any Armed Forces).
The Truth: The actual capability is still a long way off.

The common talk among groups that want to scare the shit out of the public is that North Korea will soon have the ability to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon.
This is actually far from the truth. Currently, North Korea's missile capability can potentially hit the Aleutian Islands and Guam but as far as that goes, it can probably be achieved with an empty or near empty-payload. Seriously nothing like a 1,000 lb conventional warhead. For comparison, during the Gulf War, Iraq's Scuds were armed iwth 2,000 lb conventional warheads and proved to have pretty woeful accuracy for the most part. Iraq launched about 40 Scud missiles against Israel and 46 against Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War which led to only one Israeli and one Saudi death. One that managed to hit a US Air Force Barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia killed twenty eight airmen but judging from the evidence, it was most likely to be a fluke.

Differences between Scuds and North Korea's ballistic missile:
1) Scuds can be fired from mobile launchers. North Korea's intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) are far too big for that.
2) The flight path and range of a Scud, especially those fired from Iraq to Israel, is far simpler and shorter than the flight path and range a ballistic missile from North Korea would have to negotiate in order to hit a target inside US territory. Range from somewhere in the middle of Al Anbar Province to Tel Aviv is about 600 kilometers compared to about 5,000 kilometers a missle would have to travel to hit the Aleutians.


A mobile Scud launcher (courtesy: Jewish Post)

And there are some similarities:
1) The guidance system of both the Scud and the North Korean ballistic missile are non existent. Unlike the high tech weapons we have (GPS guided weapons for example) these missiles are aimed and fired like artillery pieces with a gyroscope for stabilization in flight. Their accuracy is rather woeful, especially as the range increases.
2) The heavier the payload, the shorter the range.

Let's try to break this down into why this missle's threat level has been overblown:
Issues with accuracy:
So like I said, Iraq's Scuds which have a similar guidance system to that of North Korea's ICBM and its lethality against targets merely 600 kilometers away with a heavy warhead was quite woeful. Now think about what North Korea's missile could do after travelling a whopping 5,000 kilometers with a smaller warhead? I think we're worrying about something very small. Consider that Seattle is 8,000 kilometers away from North Korea.

Issues with detection:
Like stated before, Scuds were hard to hunt because they were on mobile launchers, could quickly aim and fire within a matter of minutes. The ICBM North Korea has is a completely different animal. The fueling takes about a week, the multi stage rockets are conspicuous as hell during transport... remember for their launch tests? It means the missile has to be sitting on its launch pad for about a week before it can actually be fired to its maximum range. The world knew the North Koreans were going to have a missile ready and the whole world was able to watch. It's not something they can use for a secret sucker punch. If the North Koreans choose to use this, there is simply no element of surprise involved.

What I am concerned about:
North Korea has chemical weapons. If they are able to get this thing to land anywhere in a city, it can cause casualties but it all depends on what they use, how much of it they can put on, how they disperse it, wind speed and direction etc etc.

What this is really about is North Korea is fuming about its inability to get its way after eight years of getting just about whatever it was they wanted from the two previous South Korean presidential administrations. The current government under Lee Myung-bak is not so kind to the North Koreans and it's just a tactic to unsettle his government.
Ultimately it's about this:

Publicity

North Korea's ICBM threat is being overblown by the Press to sell stories and it's scaring the crap out of idiots who scream "FIRST STRIKE! FIRST STRIKE!"
The danger that North Korea poses to South Korea's capital, Seoul is a real one. About 23 million people live in the Seoul metropolitan area, most within the range of North Korea's chemical capable artillery pieces and Scuds (which will have a far closer and larger target than Iraq did in '91).
So what kind of threat are we talking about? According to a 2003 Stars and Stripes article, Stephen Ortwig, a USFK spokesman at the time said, "within the first hours of an attack, an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 artillery rounds could rain down on Seoul."
Considering how densely populated Seoul is, we're looking at over 100,000 civilian deaths in the opening 24 hours alone. To justify something like that, it's going to take a far solid reason than "I'm not comfortable, and I'm scared of a North Korea that can fire a missile armed with a warhead perhaps less potent than a crazy guy with a pistol at a college campus."

I am tired of this overblown bullshit regarding North Korea's missile and I'm pissed off at the press for being complete asses about the whole thing and giving North Korea what it really wants out of this entire affair: PUBLICITY.
The last thing I want is a bunch of fucking leftist journo assholes feeding neo-cons with bullshit that's going to get their pussy asses into another wrong course of action. You can count on the neo-cons to fuck up because they are:
a) too lazy to understand the real situation
b) too fucking scared to be of sound judgement
c) think sending people into harms way is patriotic when they themselves RARELY ever sign up for anything.
Hopefully the words of the neo-cons are falling on deaf ears with the current US administration.