Trump: Sky’s the limit for Tokyo, Seoul?
Hint, hint. The US and its allies demanded more forceful action from the United Nations Security Council after North Korea claimed success in testing a miniaturized hydrogen bomb and the capability of delivering it via ICBM to the US. In response, North Korea’s top diplomat promised that Pyongyang had prepared “ more gift packages from my country ” for the US:
“The recent self-defense measures by my country DPRK are gift package addressed to none other than the U. S., ” North Korea’s Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva Han Tae Song said today.…
“The U. S. will receive more gift packages from my country as long as it relies on reckless provocations and futile attempts to put pressure on the DPRK, ” Han said today, addressing the U. N. Conference on Disarmament today in Geneva.
The ambassador said his country’s latest test was “part of longer activities” by the North “to simultaneously push forward economic construction and [build] nuclear force.”
One has to conclude that they’ re more interested in the latter than the former. In an economy as restricted as North Korea’s Stalinist model, there isn’ t enough resources to fund both guns and butter. Their populace is constantly on the brink of starvation as it is, so clearly economic construction in the short run isn’ t their top priority.
What they want, presumably, is to use their nuclear weapons to force an end to sanctions so that they can then put more money into their economy. As long as they stick with the Stalinist model, it won’ t matter much anyway to the ordinary men and women in North Korea; any new resources will go to the military, as it does now. And if they didn’ t want to stick with that model, then why bother with the nuclear weapons? They could have easily saved billions of dollars and sanctions while sliding into a Beijing model of state-run enterprises, shifting from communism to fascism, while demonstrating the small differences between the two.
