True enough, it's clearly a pretty horrible regime.   Equally clearly there is no prospect that an invasion from abroad would do anything other than make it worse - if Iraq is bad enough in that respect, an attack Korea would be far more devastating.

If the existence or the possible existence of nuclear weapons serves to rule out that option, that's a good thing. As Vaclav Havel says in that piece Wolfgang just linked to, the right thing now is to concentrate on the human rights issue.

The important thing though is that this shouldn't be done as a way of carrying on domestic policy in other countries, making gestures to show how tough some poliotician is and so forth. There are ways of helping people in North Korea have better and freer lives, but sabre-rattling isn't one of them.