NYC Letter: KA-fizzle

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has said it exploded a nuclear bomb.

Perhaps you saw this coming...

...though it's not certain that it has, in fact, come. Fact or fiction, DPRK has announced it has detonated a nuclear bomb, which is good enough for the intended effect -- international heebie-jeebies.

What will be done? Well, our guess is not much. Similar to the not much that followed India and Pakistan -- and soon Iran -- inviting themselves into the nuclear club. There is not much stomach among well-behaved nations or marginally behaved nations or even the badly behaved nations for tough remedies. If you have ever read a UNSC resolution, even the toughest language is a rich mush of plausibly deniable intents.

Had North Korean juche (주체 = subject, i.e., self-sufficiency) been left to its own ends, well, North Korea would be a very different place today. Very probably Korea would be whole. But that would have meant a lot of dead North Koreans. Dead from starvation. Dead from disease and illness. Dead from the privations of the juche state. Instead a lot of well-intentioned and admirable humanitarian aid has kept the country's military well-fed and the rest of the country in a passable feudal state. Of course if the DPRK makes good on any of its various threats over the years of raining down fire on Seoul and now America and Japan, well, that will mean more dead North Koreans than had the juche state been left to fail of itself.

Ironically, all that death will not be from a nuclear inferno unleashed by Pyongyang from an arsenal it does not possess. It will be from putting the dead stop to its massive land army* poised to overrun the prosperous south. Which, if you paid attention during the Vietnam conflict, is the sort of remediation impoverished closed communist states exact from their prosperous neighbors.

If North Korea has a nuclear bomb or several or the means to make bombs or just the know-how, it is not going to give up any of whatever it has without an epiphany similar to the one visited on Muammar al-Gaddafi.

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* World's fourth largest standing (active forces) army: 1,106,000, active; 4,700,000 reserve; 189,000 paramilitary. Total: 5,995,000