North Korea’s Kim warns failure to provide food a ‘serious political issue’
I am a bit amused that Reuters selected a side shot of Kim there, to highlight his rotund profile.
However, I think that this might have more to do with the fact that he just sold off a lot of North Korea’s munitions to Russia, and traditionally, a lot of North Korea’s deterrent is that in the event of any conflict, it’d take about a week for us to wipe out their artillery. They normally keep quite a bit of that at the border, and in that time, they’d cause catastrophic damage to Seoul and its residents.
A Means to Retaliate, Coerce, Deter, or Terrorize Populations
North Korea maintains nearly 6,000 artillery systems within range of major South Korean population centers, which it could use to kill many thousands in just an hour, even without resorting to chemical or nuclear weapons. Researchers assessed the magnitude of this threat across five attack scenarios, using estimates of the number of North Korean artillery systems, the population densities of potential target areas, and assumptions about the locations of people at the time of the attacks (outdoors, indoors, and below ground). The strike scenarios assessed were (1) five minutes against a major industrial target, (2) one minute along the DMZ, (3) one minute against downtown Seoul, (4) one hour along the DMZ, and (5) one hour against downtown Seoul. Estimated total casualties from the attacks ranged from about 4,500 to more than 200,000.