North Korea 'to halt nuclear testing'

[sofa king]

7. It could be more true than that.

North Korea was sitting on several kilotons of unexploded ordnance dating from roughly World War II, including millions of artillery shells that were becoming old, unreliable, and potentially dangerous.

Rather than actually building a nuclear weapon in a country without reliable supply of food, power, precision instruments or un-warped rational thought, it would have been a lot easier for the NKs to blow up all that aging ammunition deep underground, have it read on seismometers around the region, and then tell everyone they have nuclear weapons. Their closed society and penchant for secrecy lends itself to that approach perfectly.

From that point on, if everyone buys it, the North Koreans are then negotiating away a capability they never had for pure profit. When the timing is right, they can graciously step away from the nuclear table with an armful of concessions they wouldn't otherwise have extracted, with virtually no actual investment.

Oh, and don't worry, they still have enough artillery shells to drop several kilotons of conventional explosives on Seoul in less than a day, so a nuke is hardly an essential accessory for their war machine. The threat North Korea presents has always been credible, whether or not they ever had The Bomb.