North Korea is respected because of the level of damage it could do while going down in a fight.
Its Nukes are useless and will get knocked out in the first minutes of a war,
but NK artillary will level a large part of soeul and kill at least 30,000 to 50,000 people mostly civilians in the first hours of any war,
Ofcourse they will lose and the conventional war will be over in months, but you may have one hell of an insurgency.
Now do you understand why they are still left alone standing?



