North Korea announced it had conducted a second underground nuclear test.
Next, it plans to carry out tests above ground.
Unfortunately, the ground it plans on carrying out the tests above is called South Korea.
The two Korean states declared an end to war in the Fifties, but now North Korea is starting production of plutonium.
Seemingly, their plan is to source a fleet of DeLoreans so they can take the whole army back to 1953 to finish the job off properly.
TheWest is pretty much powerless to do anything about North Korea because, unlike Iraq, their weapons of mass destruction actually exist.
I'm not sure I'm seeing the problem, to be quite frank.
First, North Korea is so out of it as a country that, as the
C.I.A. World Factbook states, "North Korea, one of the world's most centrally directed and least open economies, faces chronic economic problems. Industrial capital stock is nearly beyond repair as a result of years of underinvestment and shortages of spare parts. Large-scale military spending draws off resources needed for investment and civilian consumption."
Gee, that doesn't sound familiar at all. I've never known a major country to go gorge itself senselessly on military spending to the detriment of its own economy.
Oh, wait. I can think of two off the top of my head. And they delicately note, "Industrial and power output have declined in parallel from pre-1990 levels." Something else happened in 1990, can't quite remember what, did bother Cuba as well.
Let me get this time line straight, using the C.I.A.'s numbers as they're handy and probably more reliable than Wikipedia by a slight margin.
"North Korea has chronic food shortages caused by on-going systemic problems including a lack of arable land, collective farming practices, and persistent shortages of tractors and fuel."
1995: "Famine threatened." Does this mean that famine came sniffing around like a drug dealer at a public housing project or what?
2002: Government begins allowing private farmers' markets and private farming to boost agricultural output.
October 2005: Government decides it was off its rocker in 2002, and instead forbids private sale of grains and re-instituted centralised food rationing.
December 2005: Government terminates international humanitarian aid, such as the always controversial
United Nations World Food Programme. "External food aid now comes primarily from China and South Korea in the form of grants and long-term concessional loans." A long-term concessional loan is like money lent to a younger brother.
summer 2007: Severe flooding causes food shortage.
October 2007: South Korea "agreed to develop some of North Korea's infrastructure, natural resources, and light industry" which to me reads like "Money lent to a younger brother with a promise he won't spend it on strippers and booze."
May 2008: U.S. government decides to send 500,000 metric tonnes of food to North Korea.
2008: inter-Korean economic cooperation slowed as Pyongyang restricted tourism and manufacturing joint ventures in the North, and food aid from South Korea was suspended.
Oh, and tellingly:
North Korean ₩ per US $ varies between 140 and 170. This is the number that the government will helpfully tell you while cashing your Intourist cheques.
"Market rate", e.g. what a North Korean on the street would consider a fair trade for 1 dead George Washington is ... 3,400 ₩.
Now, as a straightforward number, that's meaningless. We're perfectly good at practising inflation whenever the hell we feel like it anyway.
But based on U.N. estimates, the Gross Domestic Product of the country is 40,000,000,000 US$. And also based on U.N. estimates, the population is 22,665,345. (Cuba, North Korea and Russia all came up with the same basic trick of refusing to tell anyone any of the numbers that they knew, which we
know they knew because they
did tell us that 34% of the population is engaged in "services", and I somehow doubt in a country where it's illegal to own or run a business or try to make money or do anything but starve, chances are most "services" are rendered unto Caesar.)
Assuming the idealist Marxist state (you know, the one where you can leave your American Spirit Blues in the carton in the kitchen and no one takes more than their share?), that means that your average North Korean earns about $1,764.81 per year ... at the official trade rate, which is the one the government is using. That means, officially, say, 150 ₩ to the US $, so 264,721.5 ₩ in their own terms.
Yet you can find people on the street who would trade 3,400 ₩ for 1 dead President. I'm assuming the value of the people who actually attempt to end up something other than dead are subsisting on ... $77.86 per year.
This tourism thing, they haven't got figured.
Lonely Planet, in its long-standing tradition of promoting holidays to places that Amnesty International pelts with mail, informs us that "As well as paying for your bed and board in advance, you will also have to pay for two guides and a driver, making group tourism one of the few measures that can save you money. ... As a rough guide, solo travellers should bank on paying about €250 per day for guides, hotel and full board. This can be reduced to around €130 per day if you go as part of a group."
Part of the math isn't working out here.
Since the Lonely Planet people have wisely surmised that if you're going to pretend to be a non-American for this, you should be paying in Euros, I have to figure out what an average € for an average US $ is worth. With the aid of
Triacom, I figure out that 1 US$, from 1999 - 2007, is worth 0.899€. Okey-dokey. The number's probably screwy, but this is a middle-of-the-night blog post, okay?
So, to translate the Lonely Planet's numbers up there, you can expect to pay $224.75 daily, or as little as $116.87 if you're with a group, which is frankly the only way I'd travel to a dictatorship with no functioning government system, no Embassies from anywhere that isn't scarier than it and which still somehow believes in Marxism as firmly as the English department at Yale or some hippies in Berkeley.
Yet I just figured out up there that $77.86 is a fairly realistic representation of what your average person lives on per annum. So, at a minimum, you're paying $39.01 daily more than your average annual wage to travel in a group, or $146.89 daily if you insist on sleeping alone. Than your average annual wage.
People who have much more of a grip on this than you, Mr. Boyle, have figured out that North Korea may be headed by a nutso dictator, but it's hard to get trained nuclear physicists on the job when you're expected to live on less in a year than your average Manhattanite splashes out on taxi fare in a single day.
