Threats Posed By North Korea - China's Sword

By Roberto Miguel Rodriguez

North Korea remains one of the hot spots in 21st century politics. This is one country still subscribing to the traditional Marxist ideology and unwilling to join China, Vietnam, the former Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries in pursuing an open economy based on trade and capitalist practices. The country remains poor and isolated, but has the fifth largest army in the world, and allegedly a few nuclear weapons and the ability to launch them as far as Japan. In this paper, I will make a brief analysis of North Korea’s military capabilities, including its nuclear program and its security implications in Northern Asia and the world, and discuss the characteristics of the country’s faltering economy, which serves as a limit for North Korea’s military buildup and constraints many of the country’s strategies, but probably will not collapse the regime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781105127014

Book preview

Threats Posed By North Korea - China's Sword

Threats Posed by North Korea - China's Sword

Roberto M. Rodriguez

Copyright © 2011 Lulu Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

IBSN:  978-1-105-12701-4

Table of Contents

North Korean military capabilities

SECURITY IMPLICATIONS IN NORTHERN ASIA

Weapons for Sale

THE NORTH KOREAN FALTERING ECONOMY

The disintegration of the former Soviet Union in 1989-1991

The dependence on China

Isolated and Poor: The new economic realities

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

North Korea remains one of the hot spots in 21st century politics. This is one country still subscribing to the traditional Marxist ideology and unwilling to join China, Vietnam, the former Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries in pursuing an open economy based on trade and capitalist practices. The country remains poor and isolated, but has the fifth largest army in the world, and allegedly a few nuclear weapons and the ability to launch them as far as Japan. In this paper, I will make a brief analysis of North Korea’s military capabilities, including its nuclear program and its security implications in Northern Asia and the world, and discuss the characteristics of the country’s faltering economy, which serves as a limit for North Korea’s military buildup and constraints many of the country’s strategies, but probably will not collapse the regime. I will also analyze the security implications of the North-Korea-China close relationships. Security is here defined as the set of conditions, mostly military, which may represent threats to a nation or a nation’s survival.

North Korean military capabilities

Pollack (2005) has emphasized that the military forces on the Korean peninsula constitute the largest concentration of conventional capabilities anywhere in the world, and thus, the peninsula is arguably the most dangerous flashpoint in global politics. [1] The military forces in North Korea have been estimated at 1,106,000 active military forces, 4,700,000 committed to reserve duties, and an additional 189,000 assigned to public security… which means that with an estimated population in the range of 22 or 23 million, this military manpower level exceeds that of any other state in the world. [2] By this estimate, the total of active and reserve forces constitutes almost 40% of the total population of North Korea. However, a Japanese political scientist believe that the "North Korean regime’s possession of the military capacity to inflict such damage is logically the only guarantee it has of