North Korea

North Korea (officially, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) is a state located in northeast Asia. It is one of the two states (along with the Republic of Korea) that developed from the partition of Korea by nations that defeated imperial Japan. North Korea's attempt in 1950 to unify Korea by force ended in a stalemate. Since the collapse of the Soviet block it has been a focus of international tension, which increased with its development of nuclear weapons.

Sourced

• I'm getting a little fed up with hearing about, oh, civilian casualties. I think we ought to nuke North Korea right now just to give the rest of the world a warning.
  • Ann Coulter, quoted in an interview with George Gurley in The New York Observer (10 January 2005)

• In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint.
  • Christopher Hitchens, Worse Than 1984: North Korea, slave state, Slate, May 2, 2005

• We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too.
  • Curtis LeMay in Strategic Air Warfare: An Interview with Generals (1988)

• Unification, as I have mentioned, can be a euphemism for conquest, a gloss for winning the war.... The south's disagreement [against North Korea's proposal for confederation] is in part due to the fact that they believe that the nation and state must be one, that a confederation is not unification, and that north Korea must be totally absorbed into the south, its state destroyed, and its people assimilated.
  • Roy Richard Grinker, Korea and Its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War (1988), St. Martin's Press.

• North Korea is strengthening its defense because it has strained relations with certain states. But the militarization of economy is also the most effective way of managing the state. It provides a chance of modest feeding of great number of people.
  • Konstantin Pulikovsky in Orient Express (2002)