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North Korea has long engaged in illicit activities of various sorts including counterfeiting, smuggling, drug trafficking, insurance fraud and so on. The importance of these activities to the North Korean economy is often exaggerated—attributing to North Korea revenues based on the “street prices” for drugs that go through multiple hands before reaching the final consumers, [...]
You Tube viewers from around the world were wowed by Israeli Iron Dome technology deployed during the recent fighting with Hamas. Now the Iron Dome may be coming to the Korean peninsula as part of an Israeli-South Korean arms deal. According to an Israeli paper, Israel will supply the Iron Dome in exchange for four patrol boats [...]
Syria has been popping up frequently in the Witness to Transformation blog of late, most recently in Steph Haggard’s piece on possible North Korean involvement in missiles fired from Gaza into Israel. More often, however, the linkage has been via interdiction of North Korean arms allegedly bound for Syria in violation of UN Security Council [...]
One of the stories that we have been following is the development of the mining sector in North Korea. Yonhap is now reporting that according to the Seoul-based North Korea Resource Institute (NKRI), North Korea has nearly $10 trillion in underground minerals. As Scott Bruce points out in a recent piece, there are both financial [...]
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Those of you with toddlers will get the reference. Yonhap summarizes a report from the Korean Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA) which puts North Korean military spending at $8.77 billion in purchasing-parity adjusted terms or 15 times the $570 million announced by the North Korean government. The estimate would imply [...]
As reported by the Daily NK, North Korean arms (rockets, heavy machine guns etc.—see photos) have turned up in Libya, some in crates labeled “parts of bulldozer.” Such exports are prohibited under UN Security Council Resolution 1874, hence the need for bulldozers equipped with cannons. The international community has had some success in interdicting such [...]
