the Soviet Union, North Korea has good reasons to want nuclear weapons, Mack points out in this collection of essays a dozen scholars of various na- tionalities. They would serve Kim's regime as a deterrent to the threat implicit in the U.S. "nuclear umbrella" over South Korea, and also against South Korea's smaller but over-whelmingly superior conven- tional military.
North Korea today is "the most militarized, brutal, and undemocratic country in the world," observes Yale University's...