The claim has always been made that attacking NK was off the table anyway, because they have obscene numbers of conventional artillery pointed directly at SK's capital and largest population centre, right across the DMZ; even the fastest decapitation strike wouldn't have prevented Seoul from getting flattened. Nukes definitely don't hurt but I'm not actually sure NK needed the bomb as an additional deterrent.

Exactly, the threat of using nukes needs to be credible in order to work as a deterrence.

That doesn’t make sense. Even if you are almost certain they won’t use the nuke, do you really want to take that gamble?

NK didn’t get nuclear weapons until several years after the invasion of Iraq, and it was probably longer still before they had a viable delivery system. The nukes clearly aren’t the only reason they’re left alone.

I mean, nothing unhinged here, nukes are only ever useful if other countries believe you will use them when attacked. Same thing for North Korea as the US, France, etc. (Well, nuclear war is unhinged, but...).

Who is "them"? Definitely not the people.

"safety" for whom? Definitely not the people. They starve.

What about its people?

Nuclear weapons have a very brief transition from “everything is fine and nothing bad has happened” to “we’re completely fucked.” The fact that nothing has happened yet isn’t very reassuring to me with all the ways things can go wrong. The threat of retaliation certainly puts a damper on a first strike, but there’s always the possibility of a mistake, someone feeling backed into a corner, or not believing the consequences, or just going a little crazy. The more countries that have them, the more likely this becomes.

South Korea has the capability to build nuclear weapons very quickly if needed, they're a nuclear threshold state.