…For showing your nuclear arsenal is as powerful as America’s was in 1945… That’ll show them.
But seriously, is it too much to ask that for once, the news coverage of these events does not follow the well worn, wrong paths in which everything is looked at through the point of view of “the west”, anything North Korea does is dangerous and irrational, a threat to world peace and only lip service is paid to the context in which North Korea has decided on building a nuclear arsenal, that this is in fact a rational strategy on their part? And would it kill journalists to every now and then mention the greatest “rogue” nuclear power in the world, Israel, which still does not admit to owning nuclear weapons but is thought to have an arsenal of in the hundreds? I won’t mind if nobody mentions the inconsiderate fact that the sole nuclear power to have ever used the weapon in anger is that bastion of liberty and justice, America itself and that it used the atom bomb largely as a warning against the USSR?
North Korea, even though it is an opressive dictatorship, has valid reasons to arm itself with the sole weapons to command the respect of the world’s sole superpower. It can’t really trust its supposed superiority in conventional weapons (and in any case, they still think the Mig-21 is a frontline fighter and upgunned T-55s a match for modern tanks) to deter South Korea and the US from attacking it, but the prospect of a nuclear battlefield still scares America enough to deter it from doing anything drastic. Again and again in the last two decades the US has shown North Korea it will only take it seriously if it rattles the nuclear sabre. Can we blame it then for doing so?