Perhaps regaining the entirety of the Korean peninsula? Perhaps to build/buy more military equipment before waging an attack on the us? Perhaps just to hold on to the title of biggest global troll? I don't know Kims mind set. He could be a mad man, in which case he may not even need a logical reason.
OK, let's just assume that he's not insane. Because despite you getting ornery about the fact that another country has the balls to tell America to shove it, from the perspective of a ruler of NK most of what he does makes sense. I mean, he does have Trump threatening to invade his country.
Do you have any reasonable things that he might wish to accomplish that would actually be in the interest of North Korea other than defence? Cos that's all I can think of. And that seems fine, that's essentially the same reason all the other nuclear states have nukes. A reasonable comparison might be Israel, who has them specifically because they are/have been under imminent threat and deemed it necessary for the survival of their nation.
What made sense about leaving the NPT in the first place, agreeing to follow the terms, then drop out again,
several times over? Self defense may be the public excuse, but i certainly dont believe it to be the truth. Throwing icbm over other countries doesnt make for a good self defense story either.
It doesn't? Hell. What about detonating nukes in the South Pacific? Does that sounds like a good self-defence story? How about flying nuclear laden bombers around the borders of another country? How about two nations moving their launch sites into allied countries closer and closer to each other's borders until we get the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Look at where North Korea is located. If they launch anything it's going over
someone. They somewhat intelligently picked the country that is still under a non-aggression treaty forced on them after WW2 by America. Japan would be violating their own constitution to retaliate. The worst they can do is send a stern letter.
The US can retaliate for them, but that's sort of the whole point, right? The fact that the US and Trump are already gung ho on stomping NK into the ground, and so arguably NK makes the right call by accelerating missile development to the point where the US might consider that it's not a war worth getting into.
It's funny how much more sense global politics makes when you put aside your personal feelings and just treat each country as it's own entity not connected to you. You don't have to buy into the propaganda about the evil Hun, or the nasty Japanese, or the suicidally bloodythirsty towelhead, or the crazy North Korean.
You can think about if you were a small country that was formed as a puppet in a war between two international powers, that has now been around for long enough to probably be reasonably considered a country in it's own right, and which is still to some extent playing second fiddle to the wishes of China and Russia. You've seen other countries like Afghanistan be turned into an endless civil war, and you've seen the US go in and stomp Iraq for basically no good reason at all. You're rightly fearful that you might be next, and that seems pretty plausible given that the US has been involved in one war or another for decades and seems to be pulling back at the moment. Are they going to let the world's biggest military stand idle, or will they use it on you? Is Trump all hot wind, or is he really crazy enough to launch an attack on you? He certainly doesn't seem that stable, and it seems an awful thing to gamble an entire country on, that the unhinged, uninformed egotistical POTUS thing is all a big act.
I'm not particularly sympathetic to the way NK seems to be run, the common people live startlingly meagre lives and are denied a great amount of knowledge about the world and their place in it. But from a military perspective I think a lot of the NK decisions seem to be quite rational given the history and what's going on around them. Particularly their recent moves to create stronger relations with SK, given that at the moment neither SK or NK seem particularly interested in taking the other by force as much as they'd simply like to keep what they have now. SK is a good ally to have in terms of keeping the US out of the Korean peninsula, and if the US goes to war in NK without the blessing of SK it could get quite sticky.
