We've been paying a lot of attention lately to Iran, a rogue nation that is seeking to obtain nuclear weapons. Sometimes, in all the (deserved) fuss over Iran, we forget that there is already a rogue state that has nuclear weapons. North Korea is a communist state, rather than an Islamic theocracy, but that doesn't make it any less crazy. And North Korea's regime isn't just run-of-the-mill communist. It's a brutal, isolationist, Stalinist dictatorship that is inexplicably run as a hereditary monarchy.
Kim Jong-Un is the latest stunted little gargoyle with bad hair from the line of stunted little gargoyles with bad hair to run North Korea as a personal fiefdom, and now his regime has reportedly ordered a new spate of nuclear weapons building, as well as an increase in intelligence-gathering, all aimed at South Korea.
North Korea will strengthen its nuclear force "both in quality and quantity" and expand the role of its military intelligence agency focused on South Korea, state media said Friday.
Pyongyang is under widespread sanctions over its nuclear programme, and the two Koreas remain technically at war as their 1950-53 conflict ended without a peace treaty.
The announcement comes after North Korea has repeatedly spurned South Korean President Lee Jae-myung's dovish overtures, labelling Seoul its "most hostile" enemy and declaring itself an "irreversible" nuclear state.
The issues were discussed during an enlarged meeting of the ruling party's central military commission on Thursday, Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency said.
The meeting decided on measures such as "bolstering up the nuclear force both in quality and quantity", the report said.
Important point here, and an instructive one: Once a rogue nation has nuclear weapons, it immediately becomes a more complicated problem. Were Iran to gain such a weapon, even if it didn't do as many predict and immediately use it, the prospects of taking out targets within that country, as the United States is doing now with impunity, would suddenly become much more problematic.
Read More: North Korea's New Nuke Sub: Hull of Fame or Another Fizzle?
New Fruits of Leftism: North Korea Executes Teens Over S. Korean Media
Then there's the espionage problem. North Korea, in its attempts to spy on South Korea, has one big advantage: The people on both sides of the border are Korean. They speak the same languages. They retain a lot of the same culture. A North Korean spy can blend in to South Korea much more easily than an Iranian can into Israel. Of course, there is one key difference: Any asset that North Korea may want to infiltrate into South Korea may well have to be fattened up first, as most of that country is slowly starving to death, although Kim Jong-Un himself certainly looks to be well-fed. But then, that's always the way with communist governments.
Now, it's unclear just to what extent North Korea can expand its nuclear arsenal. But it does beg the question: Why? Are they just engaging in the typical saber-rattling that North Korea has routinely done since 1950, or is there some other purpose here? Might someone from Pyongyang be in touch with someone in Tehran? There is, as yet, no evidence of any such possible deal-making, but it is far from impossible.
North Korea may be a nuclear-armed communist dictatorship, rather than a largely defanged Islamic theocracy, but they are certainly no less troublesome - and they have the capability of causing a lot more trouble.
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