A report on the ABC's PM program tonight was thought provoking but not for the reasons the presenters probably imagined.

The story started by informing us of the annual US/South Korea military exercise that inevitably puts the wind up those pesky North Koreans.

“North Korea's Foreign Ministry said the country would react by strengthening its nuclear deterrent. Yet for all its sabre rattling there's ample evidence that North Korea's military program is only kept going at the expense of people's basic welfare.”
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2010/s2841097.htm

The rest of the report went on to detail the harsh deprivations suffered by the North Korean population and it indoctrinated Yankee hating ways.

Is it me or is there an enormous disconnect going on here. How do you think a small country with a paranoid leadership is going to react to a massive military exercise conducted every year on its doorstep. Surely this is like poking a stick at a starving rabid beast hoping to bring it to heel. Is it surprising that so much of its limited resources are directed at military spending? The South Koreans are more than capable of dealing with any threat from the North bar nuclear with its 700,000 active service personnel and far superior weaponry without the help of the US.

Is the US intent to try and do a Reagan and take the country to near bankruptcy to cause its collapse like it did with the USSR? Well this nation is well past that point and still its people suffer terribly.

This may well bring the usual wolf pack out howling in protest but I for one am prepared to start laying responsibility for North Korean famine deaths at the feet of the US unless it comes up with a new strategy that allows the North Koreans to back off the military spend.

A start might be sending the money saved by discontinuing these exercises to the North Koreans in the form of aid.

Finally might I invite the PM program to join a few dots every now and again.

Reagan's policy in the 80's was to accelerate the arm's race, as he knew the USSR could not compete financially. This bankrupted the soviet union which lead to its collapse in the 90s.

The same policy is being applied to NK whose standing army is huge, but if faced with an actual war would not be able to sustain combat for long.

The North Koreans have a shiny powerful war machine, but the tank is empty, and both sides know it.

Actually the collapse of the USSR had more to do with the failure of their wheat crops and the rising ascendancy of the EU where the Soviets would have been threatened on two fronts instead of only one.

Add internal corruption where certain members of the Politburo saw their chance to become overnight billionaires plus the misguided antics of Dancing Boris and it was inevitable that those in charge would take the money and run.

The notion that Reagan was some sort of brilliant strategist is far too generous.

It's becoming more apparent that Reagan's strategy screwed their own economy as much as it did the Russians.

North Korea's current stance and posturing with the West is as much due to Clinton and Bush deliberately going back on certain pre-arranged deals than anything else.

Being in China's shadow is North Korea's only real protection at this time and will probably remain so.

As far as them being a major component of any "Axis of Evil", it's more a notion for domestic political consumption than being a Real-and-Present danger to the rest of the world.

Wobbles,

Do you have any references for your opinions or are you making this up as you go along?

By the late 80s Soviet expenditure was close to 20% of GDP (10 to 20 times what would have been required to buy or produce wheat) and enourmous resources were being diverted to the arms race and afghanistan.

I read analyses in Newsweek as far back as 85 as to what irreparible damage this was doing to the Soviet economy. The wheat failure was a symptom of this starvation of resources.

http://sfr-21.org/collapse.html

The afghan guerillas were given not enough fire power to beat them militarily, (no heavy equipment) but enough to destroy their hardware and personnel and require vast expenditure.

Once the economic infrastructure was shattered, they could no longer afford the huge military, and occupation of eastern europe, and Soviet empire simply imploded.

North Korea has never bothered to try and keep any of its committments to the West, and so the West has simply withdrawn any of its support as pledged in the agreements.

The sooner the odious regime collapses the better.

North Korea's safe, it doesn't have any oil so there won't be an invasion.

Collapse of Soviet Union happened only due to wish of those with power to privatise everything in the country - thay have become milliordaries within the weeks from the start of ‘perestrojka”. They wanted to openly enjoy money and power. Nowadays country does not get richer but otherwise because money flowing out of the country where before money stayed in. USSR used to be in trade and information blockade for decades. That is not likely that any country would survive under those conditions except USSR. Also in old times USSR gave out enormous financial resources to other ‘friendly” states including Afghan government and those accounts were taken always as bed debt. Etc
Anything about NK can not be really threatening. Big interest however attracts location of this country

This is one country crying out for "regime change". But what do we in the west do? Invade Iraq. Bring "democracy" to the middle east. Why not North Korea?

The Americans seem to have been scared off jungle fighting after Vietnam and now they only want to fight in deserts where their enemies have nowhere to hide. Americans are cowards and cant bear to do anything that may put themselves at risk. Hence their cowardly use of remote vehicles. Posturing, macho wargames are all they can bring themselves to do to (pointlessly) pressure the North Koreans, who must be laughing maniacally as the septic fools give them the justification for their inflated military spending and starving of their own people.

South Korea spends over 3 times the amount on its military per year compared to the North but in $ per $1000 of GPD the North spends 10 times as much.

It has about the same population of Australia but Australia spends three times as much on its own military.

I'm not sure of the 'shiny new war machine' that Shadow Minister talks about.

If the US is the main instigator of tension in the North and South Korea is more than capable of looking after itself then why not withdraw?

It still has a huge contingent in Japan able to respond very quickly to any threat but do they really need to be on the doorstep?

Late Night Live's latest show talked about North Korea far more resembling a nationalist state than a communist one with similar leadership worship afflictions to that of Germany during Hitler's reign.

I too would like to see regime change in North Korea but these ends do not justify the means.

Regarding the famine that is understood to have claimed nearly 2 million lives in the mid 90s;

From Wikipedia.

“In June 1995 an agreement was reached that the two countries would act jointly. South Korea would provide 150,000 MT of grain in unmarked bags, and Japan would provide 150,000 MT gratis and another 150,000 MT on concessional terms. In October 1995 and January 1996, North Korea again approached Japan for assistance. On these two occasions, both of which came at crucial moments in the evolution of the famine, opposition from both South Korea and domestic political sources quashed the deals."

“Beginning in 1997, the U.S. began shipping food aid to North Korea through the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to combat the famine. Shipments peaked in 1999 at nearly 700,000 tons making the U.S. the largest foreign aid donor to the country at the time. Under the Bush Administration, aid was drastically reduced year after year from 350,000 tons in 2001 to 40,000 in 2004.”

Let common sense and humanity prevail.

Shadow Minister,

Sure, heres a few references -

Here's one on the Oil situation-
http://www.oilcrisis.com/reynolds/SovietDecline.htm

One (internal) one about grain crops-
http://www.aei.org/docLib/20070419_Gaidar.pdf

Plus another on Reagan's individual relevance-
http://hnn.us/articles/2732.html

It was a very complex situation and a bit simplistic to give all the credit to the actions of a single politician.

Nevertheless it's interesting to see that for a hopelessly failed economy it produced - almost overnight - more billionaires per capita than any other country in the world. Hints a bit about internal corruption doesn't it?

Wobbles,

Did you actually read your own links?

They reinforce that:
The collapse was economic,
The Reagan build up sparked a corresponding massive build up and expenditure in the USSR in the 80s

That the oil price collapse and the need to import wheat also contributed does not diminish the huge drain the military imposed on the economy, without which the collapse might have still come, but decades later.

The one post http://hnn.us/articles/2732.html

Claims that the point of Reagan's build up was to cause the Soviets to collapse because they could not compete was a failure, that Reagan's objectives were missed, as the Soviets matched the US build up.

I agree that right up to the point of collapse, the USSR could have provided a serious match to the US, however, that was completely beside the point.

I absolutely agree with the OP but also do realise that there's evidently some concerted plan being followed to break NK. One can only hope that the people running things know what they're doing and it will end with a fizzle rather than a bang. The cost either way in lives lost will be fantastic in scale.

The problem is that I very much doubt NK's leadership will in the final crunch just lie down and give up - they will almost certainly launch all out war with whatever they have available at the time which will not be pretty in anyone's language...

And moving onto some really scary ideas even if somewhat left of field: one interpretation of Nostradamus' predictions is that he indicates toward the end of the 20th century and into the beginning of the 21st that there will be a spate of natural disasters, a series of small wars, - and finally a huge famine which will cause the third "anticrist" to rise in the East and trigger armageddon... (in there somewhere there's reference to the "twin brothers" falling or something similar too from memory).