Nukes needed

last updated 8 January 2015

Pyongyang

North Korea is developing nuclear weapons because it needs to save money, the regime of Kim Jong Il said this week. It was the most explicit public acknowledgment yet that the country has a nuclear weapons program. The official KCNA news service said that creating a nuclear deterrent would allow the country to cut back its conventional armed forces and spend more money on the poor. Famine-stricken North Korea currently spends nearly one-third of its gross domestic product on the military, while millions of its citizens suffer from malnutrition. Refugees who escaped North Korea told the London Daily Telegraph this week that people had resorted to eating human corpses.