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The trouble is that they live in such international isolation that all they hear is their own echos bouncing back at them - and it's hard for us to imagine living in a totalitarian, Orwellian state that's been in state of war with us for sixty years. Their leaders really have kept them on a wartime footing that whole time - and a huge percentage of the GNP has gone into digging underground forts, cities, and transportation and militarizing the nation - for obvious reasons. They know that the only remaining superpower hates their guts and maintains large numbers of theatre-range, nuclear-tipped, missiles aimed at every facility they own and is constantly probing their defenses. From their perspective, it is a sane decision, intended to avoid US aggression, to have nuclear weapons and missiles capable of delivery; from North Korea, it looks like an insane decision to ever retreat from their nuclear program. They believe, as we did with the Russians during the Cold War, that nuclear capability and underground survivability may be the only things that can keep the peace. We have at least 28,000 troops on a state of nearly constant alert in South Korea and our own nuclear weapons aimed at them. It's just not a stable situation and ultimately, someday, something is going to give. It is scary.
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Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. . . Restraint in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964
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