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Nuclear bombs are essentially unprofitable and impossible to use anonymously, so they aren't really analogous to most dangerous tech that needs to be controlled.

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The armed forces you need to keep neighboring rivals or meddling first world powers out of your borders are also highly unprofitable

You're right. But I don't think profit is everyone's first concern. The Kim dynasty needs the DPRK army as a tool of internal control more than it does for defense.

The benefits that gives them are very much a type of profit.

And a few million bucks isn't hard to come by when you're in control of an entire country

Even if it's as poor as NK, the guy who commands it can have more material riches than most of us can really consider

You don't use a nuclear bomb. Well, maybe once, somewhere remote. The idea is once you do, you can do anything you want. Want to annex Ukraine? Want to run a country where you're the dear leader? All you need is a nuke.

Thats another differentiator though.

Most dangerous tech is more a "temptation to misuse" rather than a largely unusable (but effective) threat to wave around like a nuke or a biological WMD.

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