Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikegioia | Hacker News Reader

So when they did this in 2006, the UN issued weapons sanctions against North Korea[1]. Then when they did it again in 2009, the UN issued more sanctions[2] that apparently NK considered an 'act of war'. From them, the world has intercepted a whopping 6 North Korean boats and 1 North Korean airplane.

Aside from "issuing even more sanctions" what options are available to the UN? Good luck trying to send in a team of people to destroy the nuclear program, that will all but invite a warhead/attack.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council...

View on HN

For decades that's been the problem. South Korea's population centers are too close to the North for an attack to be a reasonable risk: even decades-old artillery and unguided rockets can hit Seoul, launched from hundreds of dug-in sites. So things have been organized around trying to pressure North Korea in various ways, either via China, or directly, but without force being a seriously considered option.

Yep. This is what happens when you expand too close to the enemy's base..

I think this is more due to the fact that Seoul just happened to be next to the arbitrary 55th parallel drawn after WWII.

Is that a Starcraft reference?

Better throw up a few extra photon cannons just in case.

What is North Korea's motivation? Given the UN's predicable past responses, North Korea must gain some political benefit from these UN responses.

Foreign aid so citizens of North Korea can eat.

The longer historical context is that in the 90's the PRNK agreed to hand over their future nuclear power infrastructure to us, in exchange for abandoning a weapons program. Domestic political winds shifted, and the USA chose not to honor the agreement by congress strangling funds. Instead we paid them oil as a substitute. Things broke down further in the Bush 'axis of evil' period.

PRNK's behavior right now seems to be about pushing the USA back to something like the prior agreement, likely because they see the Obama administration as more open to this possibility. Honestly this would probably be a win for everyone, particularly if it included opening up a labor trade between north and south Korea. North Korea is impoverished, but their citizenry is actually quite well educated (if indoctrinated). If economic sanctions were weakened, there's little question that access to north Korean labor would be in high demand globally. There are a lot of challenges to making this happen. Possibly the hardest are social, and will simply take the passing of generations to ease.

There are also probably important PRC PRNK relationship dimensions to all this as well, of which I'm ignorant.

NK argues that their regime is superior to all other regimes and prosperity would come any day now. Therefore asking for humanitarian aid would contradict their propaganda. On the other hand, as long as they are the worst of the bad, they have natural allies, like Iran, Myanmar and any other 'bad guy of the week.' In addition they can realistically only sell ballistic missiles and nuclear technology, since they do not produce much interesting stuff besides WMDs.

So the NK government has the choice between pushing nuclear technology and missiles, which kind of works in the short run, or they can throw all their previous work in this areas away to start a rather complicated transition to a more long term strategy. Depending on how stable the regime is, it may survive the short term problems such a change of strategy creates.

Well, in the country it is viewed that prosperity has already arrived; it is the rest of the world that is in dire straights.

Ideological zeal. One of the most dangerous motivations in all of human history.

Currently they have been using the threat of attacks as a bargaining chip to extract things like food shipments from the US and Japan.

Never ever underestimate the power of being self sufficient military wise. You can pretty much do anything you want and get away if you are a nuclear power. And its not like North Korea is going to remain poor forever.

Look at UAE and Singapore, it takes little time to change the economic situation. A little years here and there, with China's and India's emergence on the world scene things can change pretty rapidly. To cut US's influence in Asia, North Korea is a indispensable asset.

Allies are not permanent and US's help to Japan and South Korea is not infinite. Geopolitical situations will always change and have always changed throughout history.

Given this situation, North Korea can be a big player in the future, now imagine having the military might in this situation. It can force unification of the Korean peninsula on its terms in the future.

> And its not like North Korea is going to remain poor forever.

They are doing a pretty good job of being poor already. I don't think you can compare North Korea to those other countries, even China. North Korea is a world peculiarity; it is the way it is because of it's bizarre regime, in a way different from China. It is so totally isolated and the average person is so uninformed about what is happening less than 100 miles from it's borders. The kind of trade that would reduce North Korea's poverty, I think would topple the regime, a regime based on magical stories about unicorns and people that don't need to use the bathroom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com