It won't happen yet. The Chinese aren't quite ready with their aircraft carriers yet. After they can project their airpower beyond the range of land bases maybe.
Something more important to think about: in 1993, North Korea bought 12 diesel powered submarines from the USSR as scrap. 10 of these were Golf IIs, 2 were Foxtrots. It was assumed that they would use them for parts or try to refurbish them. That makes no sense as they were designed in the 50s and quite wore out. However, the 10 Gs all carried missles.
The North Koreans are smart enough to know that they are not able to stand up to the US/South Koreans in a conventional war, like they could have 20 years ago. Instead, they have been quite busy with asymetrical warfare. Their special forces number 100,000. They've been experimenting with lasers to blind pilots, cyber attacks on the economy and trying to crash satallites. I would venture a guess that the North Koreans could be smart enough to try to mount missle launching tubes from the G class subs onto merchent ships. They would then use them like the old WW1 "Q" boats, and have them out in the sealanes on buisness. Why hit usless Guam when you can just launch a nuke from right outside San Diego or Portland? Heck, for that matter, why not even right outside Washington DC? Didn't in WW2 ships used fake flags? Even today, LIBERIA has a huge fleet of merchant ships flying their flag... for tax purposes. They could easily register their "merchant ships" anywhere thy like. Don't forget that these people are also the ones that attached a laser to a ship and blinded pilots right of the coast of Washington State a few years back.
Think about it: The Foxtrots and Golfs are useless junk, even by third world standards. They have better... why else would they want them?
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