Comment by ck2
6 hours ago
Actual atomic weapons not just stockpile, hundreds stave to death there daily, and everyone knows the famous satellite view of the entire country in darkness at night (while his palace is lit)
Yet no oil so they will be one of the longest surviving tyrannies in history
We can bet every country like them now will be building massive war drone factories too
Seeing what China next door has done with solar and batteries, I wonder if they'll do an electric end-run around oil, similarly to some places in Africa.
It's not the lack of oil that enabled this. The west* fought a bloody war to defeat North Korea. We just didn't win (though we did prevent the north from taking the south...). Now you've got a dictatorship protected by their ability to deal devastating damage to South Korea via nukes, huge stockpiles of conventional artillery (and Seoul is within range), etc. Moreover one backed by a superpower (China, and before China the soviet union... indeed these countries are the reason the west didn't win the first war as well).
They could have all the oil in the world and we'd be no more in a position to do anything about it.
*US, Uk, Australia, Netherlands, Canada, France, New Zealand, Phillipines, Tukey, Thailand, South Africa, Greece, Belgum, Luxembourg, Ethopia, Columbia, and South Korea.
South Korea wouldn't exist as a prosperous Western-aligned liberal democracy without the war, so it was hardly a complete loss.
> South Korea wouldn't exist as a prosperous Western-aligned liberal democracy without the war
The first several decades after the war they were very much not a liberal democracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Democratic_Struggle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Republic_of_Korea).
We didn't win because China intervened in massive numbers to keep the regime in the North from losing the whole country.
The US did not win because the US did not win. Crying about the reasons does not help. Usual FAFO. Does not hurt to think of consequences before starting something
4 replies →
> hundreds stave to death there daily
Yeah, you will need a solid source for that.
This isn't the 1990s, while malnutrition may happen, and there have been occasional shortages (covid was one example), it's unlikely people are starving to death in 2026, let alone multiple, let alone per day.
On top of that: North Korea is not that isolated as people think. North Koreans have smartphones and plenty of those living near the chinese border have chinese sim cards. Ever wondered why defectors say they regularly phone their family? Because virtually every north korean knows somebody with a chinese phone.
Of course flow of information outside is still tightly controlled and such, but there's zero direct evidence for starvation happening.
what a weird argument just to argue
you really have to ignore international news for years to argue starvation in North Korea isn't real
keep BBC News on in the background each morning and you'll learn stuff never mentioned anywhere on US news
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65881803
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/04/12/north-koreas-leader-warn...
it's been going on for decades and yes even though 2026