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The problem with doing anything with North Korea is that they have enough artillery pieces within range of Seoul (at least 13,000) that they could put an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 shells in Seoul in the first hour of fighting. Seoul and it's surrounding metropolitan area is home to about 24 million people, so we are talking at least a hundred thousand civillian deaths in the first few minutes, and probably millions before we had a chance to stop them. We can't do a surgical strike to chop off the head of this monster, because the people manning these artillery pieces almost certainly have orders to start firing if they are cut off from command. The artillery is scattered over such a large area and entrenched so heavily that, even with a full scale US attack we would not be able to shut them down in time to prevent a major loss of life.
About all we could do to minimize this would be to do a surprise nuclear attack with multiple warheads blanketing the entire area that's able to fire artillery at Seoul. This would result in the deaths of millions in North Korea and require a massive evacuation in South Korea to avoid fallout.
It's a tough situation. There's really nothing we could do that wouldn't result in one of the bloodiest situations in world history.
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