There has been uncomfortable ruble rousing by DPRK lately.

Past 1 week alone, Kimani (these people...arrrgh! they are everywhere) has
threatened to nuke Australia (Thur last week) and to sink USS Carl Vinson (Sunday).

They also filmed Mike Karen Pence (America got 2 for price of one there)at DMZ.

If these were normal times, this would pass as usual juvenile-leader rants. But these are NOT normal times.

- the military hardware gathering dust everywhere not looking good for defense contractors and need to be put into good use. Besides, someone wants his own war with a good-sized, bad-haired enemy.

- the silent jostling for global influence between Xi and Vlad after US abdicated the role last fall.

- serious internal fault lines inside DPRK require an external common enemy.

That said, sinking the Carl Vinson = WW3.

And we look East

The world need more guys who can stand up to the oppressor, the bully... that way balance of power is achieved and a chance for peace...

I don't think North Korea has the technology to sink a US Aircraft Carrier. They can however target some army base in S Korea or Japan, with devastating effects.

Japan and South Korea can defend themselves very well, the problem is that of proximity, if North Korea launched a missile say into Seoul or even southern Japan, there would be very little warning and the effects would be devastating to the populations and extremely catastrophic if that missile was nuclear tipped. Both countries would certainly retaliate and probably defeat N Korea but this is a war they don't want cause they would be losing much more economically than their adversary.

Now if the missile were say an ICBM, then it would be very difficult to intercept and would probably hit any target they wanted because ICBM, generally first go into space and their re-entry positions are not easy to predict so even if you have interceptors (like THAADS, or the Israeli Iron Dome), they may be short off after a targets that are miles away from their flight paths.

Now an aircraft carrier is different. Its not a stationery target, it moves accross the ocean so first, you would need to find it and fire your weapons from a very short distance and hope it has not moved too far at the time of target acquisition. But even if you were to get the target acquisition, the missiles would still struggle to penetrate its multi-layered defence system.