Our nuclear threats aren’t much good here, since there’s not much we can strike without doing horrendous damage and causing an environmental and radiation disaster in nearby South Korea and Japan, perhaps in Russia and China, and eventually in the United States and Canada. (Consider how freaked out people were by one Japanese nuclear reactor melting down; multiply that by six or ten or 15 nuclear strikes.)
Another option is to strike the North Korean regime preventively, at a time of our choosing, before there is an actual threat to the United States. This is a bad idea for a lot of reasons, not least that it makes the United States the aggressor, triggers a war we were trying to avoid, and relies on the hope that we hit the right things fast enough and get it all in one shot. The South Koreans and the Japanese might have some objections to this, as would the Chinese.
Whether we’d strike the North Koreans first, however, as a preemptive move—that is, under the imminent threat by Pyongyang to attack—is another matter.
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