North Koreans Soldiers Defect, Food Shortage

There has been a massive food shortage in North Korea for the last year. Well, there has been a shortage for the last few decades, but this one is worse than normal.

Increasing numbers of North Korean soldiers have defected across the river to China. They say that they were forced to eat only noodles made of ground corn, and that any substantive food such as meat or eggs is almost impossible to come by. They also claim that party higher-ups and military leaders are stockpiling food for a coming conflict. There are two sad things to this - the N. Korean military always gets fed before the rest of the population (which even in good years does not produce enough food to feed itself), so this means that thousands if not eventually hundreds of thousands or millions of N. Koreans are currently starving to death, leaving babies to die, and living on scraps. The second sad part to this is that when the N. Koreans are found by the Chinese, they are sent back to their "motherland." Where they are then beheaded.

This also points out that with the confirmed act of war (sinking their ship last year) against S. Korea, and the increasing tensions between the two countries, N. Korea is preparing for war.

If there is a war, I think the "million man army" will turn out to be one of the most over-hyped fighting forces in history. In the words of a short Corsican, "An army marches on its stomach." What the US and S. Korea would find in a fight against the North today would be a underfed, poorly equipped army of conscript convicts, willing to lay down their arms and surrender at the first chance they had. Basically, it would be like fighting the Italians.

Still one of the greatest moments in military history is when the Allied forces in Sicily had to take bookings for Italians to surrender. So many tried to surrender at the same time, that they had to turn them away and book them in for a later date.

My point is also this - there is a humanitarian logic to a war with North Korea, though of course the big question is China - and how it will react if the "Democratic People's Republic" goes to war.

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