Breaking news this morning: North Korea popped another one, another nuke test, that is. The world issues stern warning, and sanctions continue. Sanctions? When will the world learn that for a closed, totalitarian society for which the number one enemy is a strong middle class, sanctions are a lifeline? Sure, they might hurt the leadership and the military/industrial complex, but they hurt their nascent middle class far more, not to mention that sanctions provide the leadership with the perfect excuse for anything that might go wrong within the country.
And it’s not like in this day and age, it’s that hard for North Korea’s agents to obtain high technology for their military programs. I just bought a graphics card that can serve as a supercomputer vector processor with a raw performance exceeding a teraflop, for less than a thousand dollars. And never mind export restrictions… the card itself was manufactured in China, perhaps right next to the Korean border for all I know.