No country is going to risk that for two reasons in the current global context. First, everyone will assume the payload is nuclear. Once the launch is detected

No country is going to risk that for two reasons in the current global context. First, everyone will assume the payload is nuclear. Once the launch is detected, literally no one is going to even consider for a single moment that the missile might have a conventional payload. All actions, responses, and threat assessments are going to treat it as a nuke. If you're going to launch ICBMs at people, you might as well mount a nuke to it because the rest of the nuclear club is going to respond as if you had. Second, the alert was for Hawaii. Given their isolation (they're over 7,500km from Korea), that means the missile is an ICBM. The Hwasong-15[0] can carry an estimated ~1,000kg payload, though it's unknown if it could do so for its full range.[1] That's tiny for a warhead. Mounting it on an ICBM, even if your country doesn't get blown to hell after launch, would just be a waste of money. The same goes for SLBMs as well. The only exception would be for precision strikes, but that's not really relevant to NK. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwasong-15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwasong-15 1. http://allthingsnuclear.org/dwright/nk-longest-missile-test-yet http://allthingsnuclear.org/dwright/nk-longest-missile-test-...