North Korea

Activists using drones to fly western media into the hermit kingdom.

The North Korea threat: America's limited options To put it bluntly our options are 1, accept North Korea as a Nuclear power, which will ether lead to a Nuclear South Korea, or more likely the Norks using Nuclear blackmail to restrict Seul and dominate the Korean peninsula, i.e threatening a Nuclear strike if they don't toe certain lines. Or 2, a preemptive strike. I doubt option 2 will be utilized. The US was to traumatized by Iraq to ever consider a preventative war. The UN won't grant authorization, because of the Iraq comparison, and because China and Russia will use their vetoes to keep little Kim out of trouble. And of course their's the possibility we may not get all of their bombs or reactors. The consequences of this would prove disastrous for reasons to obvious to explain.

Option 2 not working out has nothing to do with being war shy or any of that nonsense and everything to do with the fact that we will create 25 million refugees overnight.

Nobody can support that many people in such a short time.

For your information, South Korea's total population is 50 million.

Yeah, SK sure as hell can't care for 25 million overnight refugees.

North Korea may collapse on it's own anyway Surprising, I thought the economy was improving, apparently the Norks see little Kim as their JFK figure.

Why am I not surprised.

Not as in doing any good mind you, but in ascending from humanitarian crisis levels of famine, to generic third world shitholery. Don't get me wrong North Korea is hardly the land of mild and honey.

@America's limited options

I've read through it and I see no indication that options are limited to the two you presented: the article doesn't seem to suggest that accepting North Korea as a nuclear state is an option being considered.

I'm curious: what do you suggest US and other countries do?

Remind me again how many times has North Korea supposed to have collapsed by now?

North Korea's a bit like the God-Emperor. It should have died a long time ago, but China keeps it on life support.

Option two not working is tied to one simple fact, China still maintains its alliance with North Korea as a defensive one. An offensive war against North Kora is an offensive war against China, the mess would be judge, the US could win, but the humanitarian cost of launching an offensive land war against China (as opposed to say a defensive sea war) would be huge.

North Korea's Yongbyon plutonium plant back online, say nuclear inspectors

Consedering their epic fails in doing ballistic missiles tests and toting them as successes courtesy of the KCNA.

Smoking Is Not Cool says a new North Korean government campaign...too bad no one told their boss.

The boss is smoking because he invented nicotine free tobacco that cures every addiction and enhances sexual prowess, not that it was the intended effect, it is how the cigars invented are just that good.

And he did it all when he was 12 years old.

But only because his grandfather teleported him to Saturn and taught him how.

lol the last few posts.

About the collapsing thing, I don't see it anytime soon. China will prop it up, as it is still a buffer state between them and South Korea. North's nuclear arsenal (whatever that is) still works as a deterrent against any attack. There is a black market, China is providing the bare amount of food to just keep people from dying, and the Kim Jong-un is living his way.

I can easily see it surviving past the 2050s, especially seeing for young the leader is.

In the words of a prominent NK analyst (it may have been Victor Cha), you wouldn't be surprised if North Korea collapsed in five years or kept going for fifty.

Yeh, it happens often that a regime looks eternal until it's about to fall. I wouldn't be surprised if North Korea's turns out the same. Not that I'd count on it.

Even if China decides that they would prefer an independent North Korea than any possible re-unification scenario, that's not the same thing as supporting the Kim Dynasty (and I think it's safe to say at this point that it is a dynasty). Bureaucratic inertia means that it may take a while but a quick palace coup and few reforms that allow normalisation of relations with... almost all the rest of the world are still an option.

And however badly the Kims do, it's safe to say that they've spent a lot of effort into making sure they can't be coup'd out of office by ambitious subordinates.

This article is likely a fake due to complaints about the site's credibility and the utter lack of other news sites posting it, but I'd figure I'd share it anyhow.

The East Asian Tribune has reported that Kim Jong Un was assassinated by a female suicide bomber recently.

Read the article itself; the whole thing is oddly written, even describing the suicide bomber as "exceptionally beautiful" with half of the crowd watching her before the act. Yeah... weird.

Some quick digging I see a few other sites mentioning an "attempted assassination" that he survived. These are not very credible sites and even they seem to be taking this with a shaker full of salt.

Even an attempt would have been breaking news on the major sites. Its clearly a hoax.

In other news; Glorious Korea has managed to acquire the blueprints for some of America's most cutting edge weapons. And by that I mean possibly getting the engine design for a fighter jet that came into service in the 1970s.

http://www.newsweek.com/north-korean-hackers-steal-f15-fighter-jet-blueprints-470135