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gwern comments on This Failing Earth - Less Wrong
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I have to disagree here. First of all, North Korea has the world's third largest army. Any state that tried to conquer it would have its hands full. Additionally, counterinsurgency warfare has become damn hard these days - consider the Soviet failure in Afghanistan during the 1980s. As Stalin observed, it takes a generation and a half to pacify a country and convert it to your ideology by force.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, conquering poorly defended land isn't profitable any more; some time around World War I, conquest became far more trouble than it's worth. Nobody wants Somalia, even if the rest of the world would be okay with someone marching an army into it. It's just not worth anything. The British Empire, a more modern example of conquest for profit, never occupied Afghanistan. It would have cost far more to subdue the natives than it would ever produce in revenue. Today, far more wealth is created by Internet startups than could be stolen by a modern-day Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan.
To put the worthlessness of Somalia into perspective, here's some numbers:
I've been doing a great deal of reading about Korea lately, and I've come to almost the opposite conclusion - that North Korea is a house of cards which resembles a cross between Iraq & East Germany.
It has a large army? Rations for it have been constantly cut and it is growing disaffected; as well, Iraq shows that a large army is just a target. It has 4 divisions of special ops? That practically refutes itself. It has a large airforce? But the recent defecting jet pilot (a remarkable occurrence itself, considering that pilots are supposed to be some of the most loyal and well-treated soldiers) apparently died because his plane had too little fuel due to systemic rationing & shortages.
Insurgency? By whom? Defector surveys show that while nostalgia for Il-Sung is still very strong (similar to Russian nostalgia for Stalin or Chinese for Mao), Jong-Il is disliked thanks to the '90s famine, and his son seems to be even less popular. Further, did East Germany start endless insurgencies after unification? The wealth difference between South and North Korea seems to be even greater than between West and East Germany.
And so on. I'm starting to be persuaded that the only reason North Korea still exists is because South Korea failed to man up and relocate Seoul's contents to Busan or somewhere much further south, and the US - which has effective sovereignty over the entire peninsula even excluding the use of nukes - doesn't want to risk Seoul's loss.
Yeah, it's a shitty army, but, as you said, it can still fire artillery shells. :(
As for your example of East Germany, the unification of Germany was voluntary. I don't think the average North Korean would be too happy to be conquered by, say, Japan. (And I don't think the people in East Germany would have been happy to have found themselves becoming part of France.) And insurgents don't have to be supporters of the previous regime; they could simply be out for themselves, or follow some other cause opposed to that of the occupying forces.
Mostly, though, invading North Korea just isn't in anyone's interest. There simply isn't enough wealth to steal to make it worth the billions of dollars it would cost to send an army to invade and occupy it.