On Wednesday, Jan. 6, a magnitude 5.1 seismic disturbance was recorded in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). That same day, North Korea confirmed that it conducted a successful hydrogen bomb test. This testing could potentially affect millions of people in Northeast Asia, but what does that mean for the average American?
Let me start this off by saying that we have nothing to worry about. It is, after all, North Korea. The best way to describe the DPRK is that it's ferocious, crazy, and weak. It'll push aggressiveness to the max but always fall short of military initiation. In reality, this has been done to better position North Korea to ask for more aid. The country itself is weak and poor, often suffering from famine, and the government always asks for aid around the same time, just before winter, when it needs the most help.
There's a theory called "nuclear deterrence" that explains that a poor country would seek nuclear weapons in order to stop having to spend money fruitlessly on a conventional military -- because with nukes, it wouldn't need a conventional military. This would save money which could go toward food, healthcare, social welfare, and so on. It usually doesn't end up working, even if that was the motivation behind proliferation. This is something that North Korea has done in the past. With every potential outbreak of a war, the DPRK has always backed off and requested foreign aid.
In total, including this most recent test, the DPRK has conducted four nuclear tests in the last decade. You have to keep in mind that no one is helping it with their tests. Going on with this, the DPRK is an extremely poor country, which will make it doubly hard for it to funnel money into its nuclear program. In order for nuclear weapons to be used, they have to be reliable and repeatable. According to a Department of Energy document, the U.S. conducted over a thousand tests before it were able to be build a weapon. So with the DPRK's four tests, there is not much of a threat.
With millions of people facing starvation in the DPRK, it makes us wonder why the DPRK would focus all its resources into trying to create nuclear weapons. But of course, you can’t really use logic to describe North Korea's government. There has been evidence of the elites in the DPRK breaking international sanctions just to get Big Macs for themselves, if that gives you any idea on what kind of people run this country.
This whole thing will blow over in few weeks and nothing will come out of it, except for the DPRK receiving some sort of foreign aid. These tests occurred just a few days before Kim Jong-Un’s birthday, Jan. 8, so we can expect some more stories to come out of North Korea. So long story short, relax, it’s North Korea, we have nothing to worry about because this occurs on pretty much a yearly basis.
