The author is correct: America should not talk, but instead send one nuclear missile that will put an end to Jong-un and dynasty and free the most miserable people on earth who are locked up for generations in North Korea.

Thinking of casualties? It is better to be dead than to live under such a horrendous regime!

Risible rubbish! If everything else has been tried? What viable choices remain? A carefully planned surgical strike to remove a patent dictator/warmongering sabre rattling psychopath, might remain the only other option to out and out military conflict.

Which may include the inevitable use of nuclear weapons? No not nation destroying mega bombs hundreds of times more powerful than that which took out Hiroshima, but tactical nuclear weapons that have a ground zero effect of around a mile or less?

And like the neutron bomb, take only life inside that zone, even in bunkers deep underground, leaving valuable infrastructure unharmed and able to be safely revisited, within months?

And if the leadership bunker is too deep, able to be made available as the target of choice by several consecutive ten ton bunker busters that seal the (rabid mad dog) targets of choice within?

We are not at war with North Korea, nor do we want to be! Nor do we want to fight a religious war against a tiny splinter of extreme violent Sunni based Islam! Even when it is patently clear, their goal is to dominate or eliminate us!

It's good to have an open mind on the prospects of a peaceful resolution with NK or even radicalized Sunni Islam, but not so open that your brains leak? Quote unquote.
Alan B.

Max's assumes that if the US and South Korea drop their military preparedness, that North Korea will have no need to build nukes, and give them up.

What a pile of bollocks. All the time the US and others were trying to engage NK, sending them aide and oil, they were building the reactors to produce the plutonium for nukes.

Max, Grow up.

Readers don't you understand it's all Trumps fault, when Obama was president the north Koreans were handing out flowers to passerby.

' meant to simulate an armed invasion of North Korea'

Surely , you mean, by NOT of ?

Aitkensen: why does US policy insist on annual military exercises, meant to simulate an armed invasion of North Korea,

I suppose they do this to show Nth. Korea that any attempted invasion of Sth. Korea would be folly.