max161,

You are one of the few people I listen to on Korea. Too many others have a year or two there and assume they're an expert and nothing new is going on. At the end of the day, we don't know what is going through the mind of Un, and all the factors driving his behavior. Nor do we know how the ROKs will respond to a potential incident. We can all speculate, some can even make educated guesses, but at the end day we're in a period of uncertainty.

In response to this comment

I remember in the spring of 1994 when the US media was full of stories about how the peninsula was on the brink of war that I wrote to a friend in Seoul and asked if everything there was OK. I received a letter back a couple of weeks later that the whole situation had been a blip there.
Unless your friend was a General Officer or senior Korean politician then it was simply an observation based on the fact he or she didn't see anything pending. I suspect you could have asked that question throughout history to millions of people globally and got a similiar answer just before their nation went to war. I think that may have a couple of times to us? 7 December, 9/11...

Of course that is one reason I think this will die down because the element of surprise appears to have slipped by, but once again I (we) don't know.