But even if North Korea were not to retaliate, there’s no guarantee strikes would achieve their goal of permanently retarding the regime’s nuclear program. Plus there would be dire strategic consequences. Beijing would be livid. The U.S. would have started yet another 21st Century war, utterly alienating international public opinion, tearing up its hard-fought Asian security alliance and inviting Chinese hardliners to push it out of the region. According to an August 2016 study by Brown University, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — in which the U.S. military has been involved — have directly cost 370,000 lives since 2001. (Not that we’ve stopped counting.)

However, the broader point is that North Korea, for all its many and egregious faults, is a state hell-bent on survival. It might have nuclear weapons, but the regime cannot use them without guaranteeing its own destruction. That’s how nuclear deterrents work. North Korea is not ISIS with an “end of days” deathwish, wreaking jihad across the globe in its quest for a global caliphate.

“Why are people panicking about North Korea?” asks Daniel Pinkston, an East Asia expert at South Korea’s Troy University. “It’s secular, they want to survive and they are very cognizant of power balances. They are not suicidal.”