Is it possible that North Koreans could have been killed or wounded in the American attack on Iran’s nuclear sites and then by American B-2 bombers and Tomahawk missiles fired by submarines? It wouldn’t surprise a Korea watcher who spoke with the Sun in the wake of the events on the other side of the world.

“North Koreans are still in Iran helping Iran with its nuclear weapon and missile programs,” a long-time analyst of North Korea’s armed forces, Bruce Bennett of the RAND Corporation, tells the Sun.  He suggests that if any North Koreans perished in the attacks, that country’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, could try to take it out on the United States.

While North Korea has formally denounced the American bombing as a violation of the UN charter, Pyongyang has never acknowledged telling the Iranians how to build tunnels and blast walls patterned after those shielding the North’s far more extensive nuclear facilities. For that reason, Mr. Kim “may be very reluctant to admit that his experts are helping Iran with their sanctions violating the nuclear weapons program for fear of becoming a victim himself,” Mr. Bennett says.

Mr. Kim “has been actively expanding his nuclear weapons production capabilities, and so he likely will feel that his facilities could be targeted next,” Mr. Bennett says. “As an extreme, he could sell one or more nuclear weapons to Iran and thereby allow Iran to do an atmospheric nuclear test to demonstrate that the United States has not stopped Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.”

The fear that the bombing could have consequences affecting South Korea has prompted its president, Lee Jae Myung, to cancel his plans to attend this week’s NATO meeting in the Hague while putting “an emergency response system” in place “to address heightened tensions in the Middle East,” according to Seoul’s Yonhap News.

Three-quarters of a century since North Korea opened the war by invading the South on June 25, 1950, Mr. Kim presumably is getting bomb damage assessment reports from his own people regarding the impact of the 30-ton GBU-57 bunker-busters dropped on Iran’s deeply entrenched Fordow nuclear site. The question he needs answered is whether they could cripple his own nuclear facilities.

 “North Korea has dozens of nuclear warheads that are stored and dispersed around the country, and a U.S. strike would be very unlikely to destroy all these weapons before some of them could be launched,” a former senior American diplomat in Seoul, Evans Revere, tells the Sun. “Unlike Iran, North Korea is not a potential nuclear threat but an actual nuclear power.

Moreover, Mr. Revere adds, “it is no accident” that North Korea “has been charging ahead with all deliberate speed in recent years to expand its arsenal, harden its nuclear facilities and bases, and enhance its ability to use these weapons in combat.” Pyongyang “long ago decided that nuclear weapons are the key to its survival.”