Unless North Korea wants to be annihilated, its leadership has to find a way to climb down from its current wave of provocative rhetoric. But one of the CIA's former top Pyongyang analysts thinks dictator Kim Jong-un will order a limited strike on South Korea – as a way to actually tamp down hostilities.

"North Korea will launch an attack," predicts Sue Mi Terry, a Columbia University professor who served as a senior analyst on North Korea at the CIA from 2001 to 2008. The attack won't be nuclear, she thinks, nor will it be a barrage from the massive amounts of artillery Pyongyang has aimed south.

Instead, Terry believes, "it will be something sneaky and creative and hard to definitively trace back to North Korea to avoid international condemnation and immediate retaliation from Washington or Seoul." This, she thinks, is what counts as de-escalation in 2013 from the new regime in Pyongyang: a relatively small attack that won't leave many people dead.

North Korea's bluster waxes and wanes so often that it's hard to know what to take seriously. But in recent years, North Korea has shown a willingness to follow its rhetoric with actual violence. In March 2010, it sunk the South Korean corvette Cheonan, killing 46 sailors. That November, Pyongyang attacked the island of Yeonpyeongdo during a U.S.-South Korea military exercise. Today, it moved an intermediate-range missile to its east coast, seemingly a feint at Japan.

"Something like Cheonan is more likely than an artillery strike like the November 2010 shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, because it lessens the chance of a definite retaliatory strike by the South," Terry assesses.

You might not know it from the American debate about North Korea, but Pyongyang has to strike a difficult balance. Regime survival is the top priority of the militaristic nation, Terry believes, so it's got to signal strength to its own populace while not provoking either the South or the U.S. into a devastating war. "An all-out war with South Korea would spell the end of the North Korean regime," she says. "Pyongyang knows this and wants to avoid it."

That right there points to the dangers of miscalculation. South Korea didn't respond to the Cheonan. But new president Park Geun Hee is "determined not to echo that weakness and has vowed a strong response to any direct provocation," writes regional expert Patrick Cronin. Terry thinks President Obama will restrain South Korea from a major reprisal – and she wouldn't "bomb Pyongyang" in any case – but Washington "won't be making any significant gestures to the North," either.

The Obama administration's goal seems to be to give North Korea diplomatic room to climb down without making substantive concessions. It's sent bombers, fighter jets and guided-missile destroyers to the Korean peninsula, and ordered a missile-defense system to Guam. But, as the Wall Street Journal reported, the administration is "dialing back the aggressive posture" so Pyongyang doesn't think an attack is the only way the current tensions can end.

North Korea tends to bluster about attacks it can't deliver, against foes that could destroy it – albeit at terrible cost, measured in Korean lives. And intelligence assessments are hardly crystal balls.

But if Terry's assessment proves accurate, the erratic standoff might get worse before it gets better. "While Washington and Seoul tries to figure out next steps, the North will then engage in a 'peace offensive', after a deadly attack, to pressure Washington and Seoul to return to [diplomatic] talks," she says. But it's hard to predict either capitol's willingness to talk if the North starts firing its weapons.