> I don't understand why the media downplays them so heavily.

And I don't understand why the media upplays them so heavily, as some kind of peer threat capable of meaningful force projection.

(Well, I do understand it, someone needs to keep pounding the drum to keep this country on a forever-war footing.)

Feels like a weird post to make in the comments section of an article in which NK performed an active attack campaign...

Not weird when you consider what is, and what is not a proportionate mitigation of a threat.

When someone gets mugged on your street, you can consider taking precautions. If your response is to roll out half a mile of barbed wire, electric fencing, and landmines all through the perimeter of your property, I would say that is absolutely 'upplaying' the actual level of threat.

Most Americans' understanding of the actual threat posed to the US by NK is ludicrously upplayed. NK is a credible offensive threat to SK, but that's a very limited problem for anyone living in Nashville, Tennessee.

I mean, the response here was a blog post, which doesn't feel particularly upplayed. I also virtually never hear about NK from anyone or fear of NK from anyone day to day, nor do I hear about it particularly often from policy makers. No one is campaigning on fear of NK that I have seen.

Perhaps TN is just a radically different world, I'd frankly believe it, but I haven't seen anything too significant at all. The last time people were really concerned about NK for like... 3 days, I think it was ~2012 or so.

> I mean, the response here was a blog post, which doesn't feel particularly upplayed.

I wasn't criticizing the blog post, I was responding to a comment in this thread that claimed that for some strange reason the danger of NK is systemically underplayed by the media.

I argue that no, the media more typically overplays it, much like it overplays the threat from other non-peer nations. I'm assuming you don't feel like the news is telling you that Iran is a threat either... Which would put you in an informed minority.

Can you give an example of media overplaying NK?

NK seems to be getting disproportionate media attention compared to other dirt poor and authoritarian countries.

>I don't understand why the media downplays them so heavily.

Because in the same way as morale can be a force multiplier, an extreme lack of it can be a force divider. Combine that with their (very likely) inability to sustain even a regional war for more than a few weeks, their antiquated equipment, and their largely unsuccessful domestic military developments, and it's not hard to write them off as largely a non-threat, whether or not this is truly the case.

The major downside is that even if they only manage to sustain for a few weeks, that's plenty of time to level Seoul and inflict damage on cities further south should they decide to make a push against the ROK, and this is what shouldn't be downplayed.

I’d bet they’re prepared to do a ton of damage to South Korea via cyberarms more than traditional weaponry too. Eg cut power to the country for days on end. They’ve clearly got 0days and aren’t afraid to use them.

If 'cyberarms' are as potent as you think they are, then how come Russian cyberarms haven't done much damage to Ukraine?

Since 2014, nations with a strong vested interest in Ukraine not falling threw a lot of resources at strengthening the country's infosec.

Also, during a kinetic conflict where you're invading, it's often more strategically valuable to lie dormant in their networks than it is to scorch them, a la America sitting inside of Iraq's phone networks and just listening.

There's a lot of work being done now to change it [1], but I've heard from multiple cybersecurity grunts in critical infrastructure that they just assume foreign APTs are in their networks. Strategically, why in the world wouldn't they be? There's basically no downside other than burning TTPs. We should damn well expect the NSA to have their fingers in every foreign pot they can reach.

[1] To be fair, there was a lot of work before too. But now people are more scared.

So, you believe their nuclear weapons don't work?

Probably not, with insufficient confidence to assume that is the case

That's a strange assumption when many countries were able to independently verify nuclear tests between 2009 and 2017. The largest of which had a bast yield 4 to 12 times the nuke dropped on Nagasaki.

These tests happened. Most experts suspect that their success rates were far below claimed outcomes. But the important question is can you put the bomb on a weapon, launch it, and detonate it at the target. I think probably not very successfully. I also suspect they’re not stockpiling these things as claimed.

I also don’t think it matters because they would be pretty dumb to use them. I’m of the mindset that they will most likely simply collapse at some point and the nukes will become unmaintained and useless.

    > third-world living conditions [...]

I know that the phrase has gained an orthogonal meaning since the cold war, but if we use the original one it's funny to call what's arguably the only remaining second-world country "third-world".

I mean if we're going by the original definitions, I think Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba are also still second-world though none of them are bizarrely neo-Stalinist the way North Korea is.

Are they really Stalinists? I would have guess Maoists, but then again, I wouldn't know the difference.

North Korea is Juche.

North Korea was generally more aligned with the USSR than the PRC. Kim Il Sung and Mao were on the way up at the same time, and were both students of Lenin and Stalin.

> I don't understand why the media downplays them so heavily.

There are a few reasons that interlock.

- The DPRK government is a mob family with sovereign status and nukes. Most folks in western countries don't have a strong sense of what that means - looking through the lens of mostly free nations, it is hard to imagine the realities on the ground, and they fill in the blanks with what they know about bureaucratic states.

- Lots of western folks, but USians in particular, are extremely ignorant and incurious about Asia and asian cultures. This amplifies the above problems and tends to lead to ridiculous ideas being believable.

- DPRK's propaganda encourages some of this. Their interests are served when people in the west are thinking about their nukes and ignoring the hacking that pays for them. A side order of "we're so mean and crazy we starve our people" helps stoke the mad-man authoritarian archetype.

> why the media downplays them

Perhaps you meant the media for some specific country, but news media in Japan do seem to take North Korea quite seriously, and missile launches frequently ends up being the first headline on NHK world news.

They absolutely do not “have” money in a meaningful sense. They are very poor and the past few years have been much harder than decades past.

> They have money

And much more of it after crypto gained popularity. Darknet Diaries went through investigating some of their hacks. Amounts from one can be more than entire GDP of a small country. Some crypto is washed through Macanese etc banks but most is just used to pay for weapons and stuff directly.