Why North Korea Can't Afford to Nuke America

Despite all the noise Kim Jong Un is making about nuking America, he can't afford to do it.  That's not simply because of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction and his inability to touch America's Trident submarines, any one of which could obliterate North Korea.  It's also because he'd target North Korea if he tried to hit America.

Recent news reports indicate that North Korea has ballistic missiles that either can or soon will be able to reach Washington, D.C.  The nation's capital would naturally be a primary target for Kim's missiles, and he'd no doubt put his most powerful nukes on the missiles headed for DC.  Those missiles, if they actually succeeded in reaching their target, would likely cause a lot of damage in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington.  The damage could come either from explosive blast or from electromagnetic pulse (EMP), or both.

Somewhere around 70% of the world's Internet traffic flows through servers located in northern Virginia (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/data-centers-boom-in-loudoun-county-but-jobs-arent-following/2014/01/17/b4a704c8-7f0e-11e3-93c1-0e888170b723_story.html?utm_term=.181c4b46bfa0).  The effects of the blast and the EMP could knock out a large portion of those servers and the infrastructure in which they operate.  The Internet could promptly become one gigantic, intractable traffic jam.

North Korea is about as isolated as any country in the world.  One of its main connections to the outside world is through the Internet.  The Internet is a crucial tool for North Korea, to steal money, do business (often illicit), to spy on other people, and to find out the truth (the problem with purveying fake news is that you still have to know the truth or the truth will sooner or later smack you up one side and down the other).  Without the Internet, North Korea would have to rely largely on its own internal resources.  And those aren't sufficient even to feed its own population a nutritionally adequate diet, let alone provide a decent standard of living.

So if North Korea nukes America, it loses its Internet connection.  And these days, that's almost the worst thing that can happen.