Self-preservation...

 


Between issuing fiery threats to immolate the United States and being ridiculed in various Hollywood films, North Korea is often caricatured as irrational and ridiculous.

But for all its apocalyptic bluster, the country's pursuit of a nuclear weapons program  including its first intercontinental ballistic missile launch Tuesday  is based on what it believes are a rational set of goals.

The most important of these is self-preservation. The country says it wants a nuclear bomb because it saw what happened when Iraq, Syria and Libya surrendered their weapons of mass destruction and their regimes were toppled or being toppled by Western-backed interventions.

It wants to stop others, namely the administration of President Donald Trump, from toppling its totalitarian regime.

"They learned their lesson from Libya, Syria and Iraq that the sure-fire way to prevent an attack is to have weapons of mass destruction, rather than just bragging about it," said John Nilsson-Wright, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.

That's why.  Just a thought.