Foreign diplomats in Pyongyang are facing an absurd choice: Kim Jong-un’s government issued a formal diplomatic warning today that it would be “unable to guarantee the safety of embassies and international organizations in the country in the event of conflict from April 10.”

A few questions come to mind, including but not limited to: Any plans for April 11th that we might want to jot down? And: Is this warning an actual expression of concern, or a way of letting foreign embassies take on the role of amping up Kim’s threats now that his own propaganda machine is getting diminishing returns? And lastly, and most fundamentally: How realistic is it to imagine a cascade of blunders that lead to a nuclear strike?

That last one draws surprisingly varied answers—and that is precisely the challenge that has confronted the United States over the past decade in its attempt to build support for a decisive response to North Korea. When it comes down to it, how you perceive the threat from North Korea hinges less on what you think of Kim and his competence than on how you stand to be affected in the event of a conflict.

For the moment, people are staying in Pyongyang. The Russians interpreted the warning as reason to at least consider evacuating their staff, but decided to stay put for the moment. The British saw it in less dire terms; they understood it to be a procedural notice, to the effect of “were this situation to escalate to conflict,” then North Korea would not be able to fulfill its responsibilities under the Vienna Convention, the Telegraph reports.

The notice came as the crisis took incremental steps in the wrong direction: having announced plans to restart a nuclear reactor, North Korea ended the week by moving a missile to its east coast. (“The moment of explosion is approaching fast,” the North Korean Army said. “The U.S. had better ponder over the prevailing grave situation.”) The missile might have been moved for training, testing, or demonstration; it was described as having “considerable” range, but nothing capable of reaching the United States; still, the U.S. is accelerating the deployment of an advanced missile-defense system to Guam, two years ahead of schedule. If there was any doubt that this moment has stopped being a punch line, Fidel Castro returned to Cuban front pages to call the current crisis the most serious risk of nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis, fifty-one years ago.

To return to the game-theory dilemma: How do these moves affect what our military planners call the “threat assessment”? Not much. The fundamental scenarios are unchanged and unattractive. North Korea has a million soldiers under arms and nearly five million in reserve. At the border with South Korea, it is believed to have two thousand tanks and eight thousand artillery systems. In the event of a war, some estimates say it would take the U.S. less than three days to prevail—but the long-term commitment could make the Iraq War look like the invasion of Panama. On his way to losing, Kim would shell the South, and, potentially, if he feared an ending like that of Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi, attempt to use a crude nuclear device.

That brings us to the wild card: Kim is simply too new and untested for us to know if he has the self-awareness to avoid inadvertently killing himself. But squeezing him into submission without the costs and casualties of a war will require China’s help, because China keeps North Korea afloat with fuel, guns, and food. And despite growing complaints among Chinese analysts, there is simply no evidence that China assesses the threat in the same way we do.

Over the years, I’ve spoken to many of the American diplomats involved in negotiations with China and North Korea, and their consensus is clear: for all of North Korea’s instability, China still prefers the status quo to a post-Kim North Korea that could very well end up under the control of Seoul or Washington. So China and the U.S. remain far apart. “Our threat assessments are fundamentally misaligned,” a former American negotiator told me.

From China’s perspective, even if Kim is losing control of the situation, he has not lost it yet, and so China considers anything short of that to be alarmist. As long as North Korea is not threatening Beijing, this is a prisoners’ dilemma we will be facing on our own.

Above: A rocket launcher is fired during a live drill in southwest North Korea. Undated photo, released in mid-March, by the Korean Central News Agency. KCNA/AP.