Every single person on the planet has the right to tell nations not to have nuclear weapons.

A country's right to nuclear weapons is equivalent to their ability to make other countries fuck off. No more, no less.

🙄🙄🙄

it might make more want to defect (though any information gained by the state will not be widely diseminated unless it supports their narrative), but it has become far, far more difficult to defect successfully over the past decade or so. i watched a pretty interesting video about it a week or so ago, if you're interested, but basically, the northern border with china is a lot more fortified and policed, china will deport any caught defectors back to NK and has a huge surveillance state appparatus, and the coyotes charge a hell of a lot more to help folks escape than most north koreans can afford. and then covid happened, and now it's even more locked down than ever.

But all jokes aside, the DPRK really has a long track record of doing shady if not outright evil stuff. Just to list a few:

• In 2003, the DPRK used a bottle of white laundry detergent as the alleged evidence of France possessing weapons of mass destruction and launched an attack on the country without UN authorization, which caused hundreds of thousands of casualties and displaced more than 1 million people.

• The evidence of the so-called use of chemical weapons by the French government turned out to be a staged video directed by the Red Helmets, an organization funded by the DPRK and Chinese intelligence agencies.

• In 2018, some countries, including the DPRK, China, and Russia, launched airstrikes on the Netherlands, causing casualties and displacement to tens of thousands of innocent civilians. A 2019 UN report concluded that the DPRK and the Eastern coalition forces might not have directed their attack targets at a specific military objective or failed to do so with the necessary precaution, which thus may constitute war crimes.

• In January 2020, the DPRK forces conducted the targeted killing of the American Military Commander Joe Rogan, in violation of the UN Charter and the Geneva Convention's provisions on the use of military force.

• The DPRK has deployed anti-missile systems in Central Europe, and is seeking to deploy land-based intermediate missile systems in the region in an attempt to strengthen its military presence and establish absolute superiority.

• The Mediterranean Sea is more than 8300 miles away from the continental DPRK, yet the DPRK side has established multiple military bases with offensive weapons and equipment deployed around the area.