How does a country like Nort Korea seem to have endless money for its army and develop nuclear weapons despite being one of the most sanctionned country in the world?
In: 1447
Don’t forget (people’s) time = money and NK has a whole bunch of people, people whose activities are tightly controlled (so they can be focused on what the government wants) and their ability to leave the county is very limited.
It’s not endless, it’s just prioritized over everything else. The State department estimated that in 2021 they spent over 25% of their national GDP on the military. By contrast, defense makes up about 3.5% of the US GDP, and 2.2% of the Global Average.
China.
China literally subzidizes every aspect of Kim-dumbhaircut-Un’s regime. If China stops trading with North Korea, their already frail economy would crumble and the elite itself would starve, not just the peasants.
North Korean economy is almost all import based. They’re going through a massive famine right now and are heavily importing food from China. What little they food do make goes pretty much directly to the country’s army to feed soldiers and stockpile for a possible war.
Beyond that, they manufacture a lot of military equipment. US Intelligence believes that they’re selling a lot of it to Russia in the hopes of buying their favor and possibly receiving humanitarian aid for their ongoing food crisis.
NK also has a pretty decent group of hackers, if you’ll believe it, that work with them. Whether they’re actually from NK or not, I don’t know, but they hack crypto and banks and shit to get money to supplement income for their arms development.
Beyond that, they don’t have the money. They just take the tiny bit of money they do have and throw it all at their military. And what they have for ground troops is mostly surplus 50/60s Soviet equipment that would barely put a dent in the US and ROK Army. Look up their drone that just crashed in South Korea. It’s… something. Their strongest point in their military is nukes. They have a small stockpile of conventional nuclear bombs and are developing ICBMs that can reach continental United States. What is not often said, however, is they do not possess the technology to miniaturize the bombs to be able to mount them on ICBMs. So they have a bomb, and they have a missile, but the two can’t be combined yet. Also, they recently unveiled two drones that are copies of the US Air Force’s MQ-9 Reaper and the RQ-4 Global Hawk and we don’t know hardly anything about how they got them, what they can actually do, etc. They can make a lot of cool looking stuff from a distance but one you get closer you see it’s a lot of smoke and mirror propaganda.
TL:DR they don’t have the money and it’s a lot of showmanship and propaganda that overplays what little they do have.
They are sitting on a trillion dollars worth of rare exotic materials they can sell to the few nations who have the diplomatic ability to buy from them. If it weren’t for their government and US sanctions they could be an extremely wealthy country like the non Yemen gulf states
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There’s a country mouse, a city mouse, and a nuclear physicist mouse. They all share ten pieces of cheese. The country mouse gets two pieces, the city mouse gets three pieces, and the nuclear physicist mouse gets five pieces, because it takes a lot of cheese to make an atomic bomb.
When the cat cuts off the kitchen, and the mice only have eight pieces of cheese, the city mouse takes 2 and a half. The nuclear physicist mouse needs all five, so the country mouse has to make do with half a piece.
The thing is, there are many many country mice. And they all live apart from each other. So they are able to sacrifice a lot. The city mice all live in PyongYang, so it’s possible to give them more than the country mice, which is all that’s necessary for social hierarchy. Point is, they like the extra cheese, even if it might not seem like much. They’ll keep pretending they live in the best city in the best country in the world. Just like we all do.
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Another aspect to consider is that every country’s best and brightest are about the same level of intelligence, the difference is how many super smart people you can develop and what they end up working on. All of NK’s smart people are working on very specific military tasks, whereas most super smart Westerners are working on designing commercial products.
Your mom says no dessert. You say fine. You go to your friend’s house and get dessert there because he has a different mom who doesn’t care what yours said. You eat dessert there.
Aka sanction evading.
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