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Filed under: Kim Jong Un, National Security, North Korea, Nuclear War, Terrorism, War

66 comments

Until Siimon Reynolds came along when I was 11 years old and scared the living daylights out of everyone with his Grim Reaper AIDS advertisements, the biggest abstract bogey man I remember was nuclear war.

A made-for-television event, which didn't quite go according to plan… Picture: AFP

Those Russians, they had the bomb, and they were possibly going to use it. It didn’t help matters that in 1986 Chernobyl fulfilled the nuclear nightmare, conflating two separate issues into one terrifying specter.

It’s probably a good indication of how little I had to worry about being a child in the 80s in rural Australia that I remember “the bomb” being on my mind every now and again.

Now kids get to worry about less abstract horrors, such as terrorism directed at people just like them. That’s worse.

But if you’re Generation X, there’s a fair bet at some stage you considered the On The Beach scenario.

Then Gorbachev came along and tore down the Berlin War. By the time he appeared in the Louis Vuitton ads we’d moved on to fearing al Qaeda, with good reason.

North Korea has been trying to recapture some of the old 80s nuclear war vapours for years but I think today proves they’ve missed the boat.

If you need evidence of just how unafraid we were of this morning’s NK rocket launch, go no further than the NT News Twitter feed.

Highlights included:

ANYONE IN NT WITH SOME SPARE FIREWORKS, PLEASE AIM LEFT AND BE READY WITH A LIGHTER. WE MAY NEED TO SHOOT THIS SUCKER DOWN #nthkorearocket

The NT News’s confidence was repaid when Pyongyang’s rocket promptly plunged into the sea.

They’ll probably try again, but for the moment, we can go back to worrying about other things.

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66 comments

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- PW says:
  
  02:06pm | 16/04/12
  
  Young chubby cheeks doesn’t look too short of a feed to me, and as such I don’t think he’ll give a flying f*ck whether the US send food parcels or not.
  
  Personally I wouldn’t give them nothin’. The more population they have, the bigger an army they can assemble against us.
  
  Reply
- Wendy Denninger says:
  
  01:24pm | 14/04/12
  
  If they want to dispense their nuclear arsenal, why not China? Nobody needs them, I sure as hell don’t, dirty fishy bastards. When I was your age, that region was just one big swamp. Ah, good times. Easier times.
  
  Reply
- John says:
  
  01:21pm | 14/04/12
  
  I thought a simple birthday cake would have sufficed to mark Kim Il-Sung’s 100th anniversary.
  
  Reply
- Mr T says:
  
  12:23pm | 14/04/12
  
  I remember when my school teacher. said one afternoon, if anything is to happen with regards to nuclear war, the next few weeks would be the time for it. I was a teen at that time, and that scared the living poo out of me. Yes all major Australian Cities were officially targeted, as well as most regional centres. At the time, both the US and the Soviets had enormous numbers of nuclear hardware to direct.
  I have tried to link what my teacher said and the current knowledge I have of the number of very close calls we have had during the cold war. Haven’t found the match yet, would be interesting if I did… I thought I knew most of the cold war incidents.
  
  Reply
- Pomseyeview says:
  
  09:05am | 14/04/12
  
  Do you think that these things would be happening if countries were run by women? All the posturing strutting male peacocks while the populations starve under the extremes of dictatorships run by men. Now I don’t rate Gillard as a woman, & I have absolutely no idea as to how she was allowed into such a position of power, she seems soterribly immature. The majority of women, despite coping with the complexity of hormonal cycles, actually have a thing called insight, something sadly lacking in most men & especially Politicians. It would take a seriously deranged woman to forgo feeding her brood at the expense of a handbag!
  
  Reply
marley says:

09:28am | 14/04/12

Do I think these thing would happen if countries were run by women? Umm, yes, as a matter of fact I do. Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 (Indira Gandhi); Falkands War (Margaret Thatcher); Yom Kippur War (Golda Meir). Go back further in history: Elisabeth I was no slouch at military and naval aggression, and neither was Catherine the Great.

Women are no more insightful and no less ambitious than men when it comes to matters political.
- James Mathews says:
  
  06:42pm | 13/04/12
  
  Well the Failure of the Launch of the Rocket which is going to be the but of all jokes that are going to be brought up if any other country wants to launch rockets and that will include the US.
  
  Reply
- Heard It All Before says:
  
  04:43pm | 13/04/12
  
  I’m not usually one to submit comments to these articles on news.com.au but this article really is sensationalising a rather mute topic.
  
  There are 2 versions of events…what is orchestrated in the public domain, and what is really happening underneath it all.
  
  The North Koreans seek the proliferation of nuclear weapons and are part funded by private investment. Any test launching of a missle requires to be disguised as a peaceful orientated test (satellite) in order to avoid backlash and sanctions from the international community. So therefore, the said missle is launched under this guise. The western intelligence analysts will deny the success of the launch and seek to ridicule North Korean by appearing to propogate that it failed.
  
  Think about the reality if North Korea was to launch a test missle and advertised it as testing nuclear capability. The result would be imminent tension leading to perhaps another cold war, more than likely war itself. Look at the actions of the Russians in the 1970s for a reminder of the impact of testing nuclear capability.
  
  Reply
- Robert S McCormick says:
  
  03:57pm | 13/04/12
  
  Yes, we remember but today we find the whole argument so hypocritical, particularly the USA!
  They say not a word when their current friends (and we all know the USA discards it’s friends without a thought) such as Pakistan, India, Israel (whom the USA supplies with their nucelar weapons) have or develop Nuclear Weapons. That, so far as the Yanks are concerned is 150% OK.
  But… when it is countries like Iran & North Korea whom the USA regards as their enemies their attitude is completely different. So far as any of us know neither Iran or North Korea have: Declared War on the USA, Threatened to send a nuclear or conventional weapon against the USA but the USA has decided & demands the rest of the world goes along with them (just as we did when the USA illgeally invaded Iraq, Invaded Afghanistan & Vietnam.)
  The only reason Iran & north Lorea are regarded by the USA as enemies is because neither country will do as the war-mongers in the USA tell them.
  We have just made ourselves a target for some future attack as a direct result of this government’s decision to allow US troops to be based on Australian Soil. The USA does not allow Foreign (Us) troops to be based or even enter US territory so why the hell do we allow them to put theirs here?
  The ANZUS Treaty is not, nor ever has been a Mutual Defence Treaty. It is purely a treaty which provides for “Consultation” between Australia, NZ & the USA. The USA is not bound to come to our assistance if some other nation attacked and/or invaded us.
  Get the bloody Yanks off our soil!
  
  Reply
Marilyn Shepherd says:

05:21pm | 13/04/12

Couldn’t agree more. Did you see Paul Ham’s program last night?

Talk about a worthless waste of time in Nam.
PW says:

05:17pm | 13/04/12

North Korea could not directly attack the US but is certainly capable of making a nasty mess of Seoul, which I’m sure it would be more than happy to do were it not for the certainty of US retribution followed by a World War involving the US and China. Pyongyang has committed several acts of war against South Korea. The US might indeed be warmongers but they are not alone.
- Matt says:
  
  03:44pm | 13/04/12
  
  Whether bombs were targeted on Australian cities or not, the simple fact is that nuclear war would have resulted in the end of the world as we knew it.
  
  While in the 80s there may have been less of a chance of the massive ‘first strike’ scenario, the Cold War was still a reality and something that I as a kid appreciated could lead to the dreaded direct conflict between the US and USSR, which could then escalate to a nuclear engagement.
  
  While I still consider myself young, when I consider that people in their 20s don’t really understand (at an emotional level) the significance of the Cold War/Iron Curtain, or how it felt when things like the Berlin Wall came down…then I do feel a bit like the proverbial grumpy old man.
  
  Reply
- James says:
  
  01:48pm | 13/04/12
  
  Fear of Nuclear War has been replaced by fear of Global Warming or Economic collapse. All fears eventually run out of puff while those who perpetrate them make personal gain in the meantime.
  
  Seeing a 12 yr old North Korean girl eating grass was on of the most devastating things I have ever seen. If the North Koreans ever get a rocket off the ground I hope it lands on their imperial palace.
  
  Reply
- Gordon says:
  
  01:41pm | 13/04/12
  
  I recommend reading “The Dead Hand” by David Hoffman. Relating the nuke & biological weapons programs as they were uncovered and dismantled after the cold war. A missile launcing system that would work by itself and photo’s of bloody great anthrax-breeding vats as big as brewery. Bad hair and body shirts weren’t the only scary things in the 70’s!
  
  Reply
- Sam says:
  
  01:26pm | 13/04/12
  
  In fact, the world came terrifyingly close to nuclear war on a number of occasions, including:
  
  A NATO war drill that was so authentic no-one bothered to inform Russia it was a drill..
  A NASA satelight launch..taken place near Norway, where was largely expected a nuclear first strike would originate. Again, Russia was not informed
  A Russian radar station operator that had all his equipment indicate a full scale attack was on the way, and promptly almost nearly initated a counter attack..but the radar was confused and was reading the rising sun as incoming missiles..
  
  There were other examples these are just the ones i remember reading about
  
  Reply
- Michellemac says:
  
  01:18pm | 13/04/12
  
  We had that spate of movies - The Day After Tomorrow and Threads. Also Sting had that song about the Russians Love their Children too. Looking back I gather it was the election of Regan that started the fear all over again but for a time in the mid-80s the ‘fear’ came back into the popular culture.
  
  My God, Threads scared the sh!t out of me for years, so much so that I had a plan of how I would get home from school, which animals I was going to save at home (a kinda rural Noah’s Ark),which shops I would raid for food and which food I would take and how my brother and I would survive as my parents worked in the city and were going to be toast!
  
  The Road was a recent example of the the post-nuclear distopia. I’ve not seen the movie but the book was pretty clear it was a post-nuclearenvironment (he saw the flashes and ran the bath for water -this resonated so strongly with me as it was part of my ‘plan’ from the 80s!).
  
  I was a teenage girl, so this was between my crush on Rob Lowe and George Michael and getting a poodle perm LOL!
  
  Reply
Austin Morris says:

04:06pm | 13/04/12

The War Game is worth a look as well as Testament. For some reason the British Nuclear war movies scared the hell out of me alot more than the American ones.
Sam says:

01:40pm | 13/04/12

Ive got to read The Road, as I thought the movie was really well done. I remember watching Threads in school (early 90’s, for History I think). One day I found an old ‘nuclear survival book’ in the school library. it came complete with diagrams of blast zones for various Australian cities and various tips for survival. I was absolutly fascinated with it, and would love to find a copy today!
Sam says:

01:36pm | 13/04/12

actually it was ‘The Day After’. The Day After Tomorrow was about climate change killing us next week
- hot tub political machine says:
  
  01:18pm | 13/04/12
  
  99 Luftbaloons. It wasn’t all bad
  
  Reply
- esteban says:
  
  01:03pm | 13/04/12
  
  I do remember having some level of fear of nuclear weapons being deployed as a result of the cold war heating up.
  
  However that was in the 70’s. By the 80’s the threat had diminished.
  
  USA lost in Vietnam without deploying nukes and USSR lost in Afghanastan without using nukes.
  
  Notwithstanding the worls was genuinely on the edge of the abyss during the Cuban missile crisis the major cause of concern is India/Pakistan or Israel/iran.
  
  I would not want to comment on the probability of a non state entity using a dirty bomb because I don’t know enough about it.
  
  In some ways germ warfare seems to something to fear but has not eventuated.
  
  During WW2 if you lived outside the Brisbane line you had lie awake at night fear of the Japanese.
  
  Reply
- Shane says:
  
  12:42pm | 13/04/12
  
  Unless you worked at Pine Gap, were you ever at risk of having a nuke dropped on your head in this country?
  
  Reply
PW says:

02:06pm | 13/04/12

Yep. If you lived at Maralinga around 1954. Not by our enemies though, and fully authorised by Menzies.

With friends like these….
iansand says:

02:00pm | 13/04/12

North West Cape.
- marley says:
  
  12:26pm | 13/04/12
  
  Remember being scared of nuclear war? As a matter of fact, I do. We had drills for nuclear air raids in school - consisting mostly of getting away from the windows and crouching under our desks. Even at the age of 6 I knew that wasn’t going to be a whole lot of help, but there wasn’t anything else to protect us. So a lot of little kids had nightmares about what would happen when the Russian bombs started dropping.
  
  I personally think the fear of the unknown is worse than fear with a face to it. Terrorism is real, but the fear is manageable: you can assess risks to some extent, avoid crowded Pakistani markets or Balinese night clubs. The threat from Russian nukes was present, all the time, back then, and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it.
  
  Reply
marley says:

12:36pm | 13/04/12

PS: I should add that I’m talking from the perspective of someone who grew up on the west coast of Canada, not Australia. The situation was a bit more immediate for us than for Aussies, what with being spitting distance to major American cities and bases.
- TheRealDave says:
  
  12:24pm | 13/04/12
  
  I don’t know about your upbringing int he 70’s and 80’s Tory but as a kid growing up in the Defence Family during that time, the ‘Bomb’ only ever rated a mention in the movies and re-runs of old black and white movies from the 1950’s. Did you somehow confuse Australian in the 80’s with the old ‘duck and cover’ days of the US in the 1950’s??
  
  Apart from Peter Garrett and his NDP no-one really gave a crap….we were so far removed from European and US politics it wasn’t funny. Despite our own grand notions of where we sit int eh global pecking order the reality is we are pretty far down…..in the 1980’s we would have barely rated a mention. Hell, we STILL aren’t even a target for anyone who could possibly have the capability…..even the Taliban spokesman needed prompting from an Australian journalist a few times before he said ‘oh yes….and Australia as well’ in his list of enemies not longer after the US punted them out of Afghanistan in 2001.
  
  Life is too short to go buying trouble were it doesn’t exist. It makes great headlines for the press but no-one is ‘targetting’ us…nor hav ethey ever, they have bigger fish to fry elswhere.
  
  Reply
TheRealDave says:

02:22pm | 13/04/12

Shh Bomb78…it was Kamarians….don’t mention that other place….

And when my old man and his mates got together it was only KB cans that were in any danger….
Bomb78 says:

01:18pm | 13/04/12

TheRealDave: I too grew up in an 80’s defense family. When my Dad and his mates got together they always seemed more worried about Indonesia than the Soviets. There seemed to be good reason Butterworth was in Australian hands until 1988.
Al says:

12:36pm | 13/04/12

Perhaps you simply need to consider further.
It is not just Australia being targeted that may result in an attack on Australia. Just think of the US bases that are in Australia, which may be targeted should someone with nuclear weapons decide to go up against the US.
It is not as safe as you seem to indicate.
However I do agree that it is unlikely for Australia to be directly targeted, there are so many targets that have a greater capacity for death and disruption than those in Australia.
- Loved the 80's says:
  
  12:22pm | 13/04/12
  
  “Those Russians, they had the bomb, and they were possibly going to use it.”
  
  I remember it well. The US propaganda machine went into overdrive. I’m not sure it was ever that close to happening though. Everyone was having a go at those “reckless crazy Russians” and their nuclear bombs and power plants. The media and the US film industry went to town on them. Even Sting was singing lame songs about “I hope the Russians love their children too”
  
  They were some good times though.
  
  Reply
JTZ says:

08:25am | 14/04/12

Trevor you do realise in the current bidget cuts on defence USAF has copped it sweet. There goes your theory.
marley says:

04:04pm | 13/04/12

@Trevor - was it overblown? The Russians occupied half of Europe in the 50s and were an imminent threat to the other half. They had a powerful military capacity and weren’t afraid to use it to keep their satellite states in line, as the Hungarians certainly found out in 1956 and the Czechs a decade later. Their air bases represented a direct threat to North America. Sarah Palin might not be able to see Russia from her front doorstep, but she could probably reach it in a microlight, never mind a strategic bomber.

It’s easy with hindsight to argue that the Russians would never have attacked (they certainly would never have attacked Australia) but the reality in North America was that a hostile force armed with nukes was within bombing distance. The Americans may have hyped up the threat - or not - but they’d have been crazy to ignore it. The world had just learned the hard way that there are people out there whose ideas of what is rational don’t match your own. And no one in the early 50s would have described Stalin’s regime as one guided by rationality.
Trevor says:

03:32pm | 13/04/12

The whole frickin thing was waaaaay overblown by successive American governments pandering to the growing military industrial complex the Eisenhower warned of only a few years previously. Curtis LeMay who was head of the USAF propagated the myth of a ‘missile gap’ and later a ‘bomber gap’ that kept, and continues to keep, the fatcats at Lockeed, Northrop, Hughes and a pantheon of other military contractors happy and returning growing returns to their shareholders.

Not to say that the entire Cold War was a non-event, but as one of Ameriac’s greatest allies, we should remember that we viewed and recorded these events through very coloured (blue) lens.
gobsmack says:

01:32pm | 13/04/12

Actually, the yanks came closer to pushing the button. It was seriously discussed during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
- Kermie says:
  
  12:04pm | 13/04/12
  
  Fear of nuclear holocaust? The legendary Tom Lehrer said it all in the 60’s with his ditties Who’s Next and So Long Mom.
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLON3ddZIw
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrbv40ENU_o&feature=relmfu
  
  Reply
- PW says:
  
  11:51am | 13/04/12
  
  “The Bali Bombings actually happened, while nuclear war between the US and the USSR did not.”
  
  But it so easily could have. The remarkable 1963 black comedy Dr Strangelove depicts a sequence of events that were by no means impossible (although it is claimed at the start of the film that safeguards existed), culminating in the obliteration of the planet.
  
  Reply
Buck Turgidson says:

01:43pm | 13/04/12

TimR

LOL brilliant
TimR says:

12:47pm | 13/04/12

Kim Jong Il was taken out by his son. He discovered he was a deviated prevert and got rid of him before he organise a mutiny of preverts
Buck Turgidson says:

12:27pm | 13/04/12

My all time favourite film. An absolute classic!
- Kassandra says:
  
  11:48am | 13/04/12
  
  Back in the 1950s we had drills at school to prepare for a Russian “atomic bomb” attack on Sydney. The teacher would blow a whistle and we all had to dive under our desks onto the floor. We were told to lie in a gutter in the street if we were caught outside during an attack. We were given lessons on the three components of a nuclear blast - flash, concussion wave and radiation - and told that if we were within 2 miles of the CBD we were probably doomed. This was in primary school, I don’t know what they were told in high school at the time. At least these days kids are spared this kind of scaremongering about nuclear war - they just get scaremongering about climate change and epidemics of infectious disease.
  
  Reply
iansand says:

01:56pm | 13/04/12

Alice Springs was at greater risk than Sydney, at least after Pine Gap was up and running.
TEZZA says:

01:17pm | 13/04/12

I.C.B. Kassandra.
I went to school in the fifties and sixties and although there was discussion about nuclear war there were never any “duck and cover” drills at any school I attended, nor did I ever hear about such drills in Australia. I do however remember television newsreel shots of “duck and cover” in the USA and I wonder if Kassandra you have conflated your memories of what happened at your school, with what you saw on television?
Nevertheless, the risk of nuclear war in the sixties to the eighties was real and the experience would not have been pleasant.

Did the U.S.S.R. have any bombs targeted upon Australia? Possibly, although improbable in the sixties. Later, after Pine Gap became operational as part of the U.S. early warning system it was highly likely that the soviets had a few bombs (maybe more than a few) targeted upon Pine Gap.

Would the soviets have bothered to target Australian cities? That could be doubtful. On one view it could be thought that there may have been little strategic reason to target Australian cities. But if you were a soviet official whose task it was to target missiles, (you would certainly know that in the event of war your own country was fucked) there may have been some incentive to spread the nuclear damage as widely throughout the western world. This could simply be a matter of bastardry (not necessarily logical but emotionally understandable since you would know that you and all your own loved ones would be vaporised). But there was also a sensible reason to target Australian cities (and possibly also places like Johannesburg, Rio, Singapore), and that is in order to hinder the re-building of the West. This would be a not illogical action precaution; given that the USA would (like the Soviet Union) have been largely destroyed in the nuclear exchange, it would be logical to think that the re-building of the West would be largely centred in rich Western countries like Australia if they escaped war damage, so therefore sensible to hinder such re-building.
M says:

12:26pm | 13/04/12

And you turned out just fine despite it all didn’t you?
- Carz says:
  
  11:46am | 13/04/12
  
  I remember having the crap scared out of me by my teachers banging on about a probable nuclear war (the joy of being educated by hippies and their children), and also being convinced that marching through Melbourne on Palm Sunday really would lead to world peace. Yes terrorism is a very real threat but somehow it still doesn’t compare to the specter of nuclear oblivion.
  
  Reply
Marilyn Shepherd says:

04:42pm | 13/04/12

I used to laugh and say “no-one can win” and nearly get lynched for not being terrified.

I was supposed to be terrified of reds under the bads and the yellow peril as well.

Now our biggest trading partner is the red yellow peril.
- David Sexton says:
  
  11:30am | 13/04/12
  
  The Al Qaeda threat was never in the same league as the risk of nuclear war with the Soviets. We came awfully close to war in the early 1960s and then there was always the danger of war by mistake. Maybe I’m missing your sense of irony, but I really can’t understand how you could say that “less abstract horrors, such as terrorism” could be worse.
  
  Reply
Steve Dunera says:

09:22am | 17/04/12

Part of the Cold War involved hot conflicts. Millions of people were killed in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan. In the 1980s Vietnam was as close as the Y2K bug is now.

The possibility of another hot conflict was high.
Daniel R says:

01:42pm | 14/04/12

I have to agree. The worst possible thing terrorism could do has probably already been done (9/11), the worst case scenario with Nuclear war was the end of humanity as a species. It wasn’t just the worst case, it was the most likely case.
Marilyn Shepherd says:

05:11pm | 13/04/12

What do you mean ‘an idea’? Ask the Japanese if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were “ideas”.
Kev says:

04:51pm | 13/04/12

One is a direct result of the other…al-Qaeda was born when soviet troops attacked Afghanistan so team america came in, armed them, had the CIA train them, knowing that allot of them were Islamic extremists. That’s what the cold war was, the US couldn’t nuke the USSR without fear of being nuked in return and vice versa so it became a race of which super power could arm the most 3rd world countries giving birth to the many atrocities that have occurred in Africa and central america (among others) since.
Tory Maguire says:

12:12pm | 13/04/12

Obviously Markus, but the piece is clearly about our experience of it here.
Markus says:

12:04pm | 13/04/12

I suspect that residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would disagree with your claim that a fear of nuclear war is not based on experience.
Tory Maguire says:

11:38am | 13/04/12

David, I meant they were less abstract because the threat came true. The Bali Bombings actually happened, while nuclear war between the US and the USSR did not.
The fear of terrorism is worse, in my view, because it’s based on experience, not just an idea.
- Paul says:
  
  11:28am | 13/04/12
  
  Why does @NTnews have to shout everything. But this is a lulzworthy twitter feed.
  
  Reply
subotic says:

12:18pm | 13/04/12

We melt you with Acid Rain
Keep you poor for economic gain
Convince you your biggest threat
Is “Drugs” and “Terrorists”
They don’t even have to be real
Find a face, make up a crime
Run sensational headlines -
Works every time.

The people must not realise
They are being manipulated
For them to be manipulated effectively
We give you things to worry about -
“Buying clothes” and “losing weight”
Your lack of curiosity is the key to our success

Your lack of curiosity is the key….
- che says:
  
  11:27am | 13/04/12
  
  I feel sorry for all those people starving in Nth. Korea who had to watch and pretend they were happy as the government spent all that money on a failed rocket launch.
  
  Reply
sunny says:

08:29pm | 20/04/12

@SteveKAG “While we waste $80bn of the NBN…......if the western world stopped all stupid projects right now we could pull Nth Korea and Greece out of the shite.” If you think the NBN is a stupid project maybe you’d better go and join North Korea and all their arse-licking style of people. You’ll fit right in - that entire country is right-wing.
Tator says:

05:11pm | 13/04/12

Marilyn,
all those poor americans are still better off than 99% of the North Koreans, even those who are the poorest in the US still have a better life and opportunities than the North Koreans as 99% of North Koreans are doomed to live in poverty as their government is a mob of totalitarian nepotists
Marilyn Shepherd says:

04:38pm | 13/04/12

46 million Americans don’t have health care and 30 million are on food stamps because of the US’s endless wars.

Millions have lost their homes, they live in car parks and tents.

Talk about rotten government.

And I forgot the $1 trillion the Bush mob gave the banks to stop the freefall while American children went hungry.
void says:

04:23pm | 13/04/12

Steve, you have to realize that North Korea has a military-first mentality,as it’s had for years. If the world were to give NK aid money, you can bet your life that little to none of it would reach the populace that needs it. Those funds, regardless of who they were meant for and who the NK government said would receive it, would go to the military and the leadership’s already bloated pockets.
Jacob says:

02:40pm | 13/04/12

$80bn???

really? really?

$80bn??

Goverment are providing $27bn in goverment bonds

the rest is being covered by private enterprise.
Markus says:

02:30pm | 13/04/12

It is going to take a lot more than $80 billion to save Greece.
And it is fairly clear the will to work and pay taxes is not with the Greek people, so I am sceptical of the West’s ability to save them from themselves.
TheRealDave says:

02:25pm | 13/04/12

lol - so its $80 billion now for the NBN??

Why not make it 100 Billion?!?

And you wonder why Anti-NBN people are considered morons? You blokes can’t even get the numbers right…let alone the technology…..
SteveKAG says:

02:08pm | 13/04/12

While we waste $80bn of the NBN…......if the western world stopped all stupid projects right now we could pull Nth Korea and Greece out of the shite.

The The Russian people got rid of communisim there, the east Germans tore down the wall. If the will is there by the people it will happen.
dancan says:

11:46am | 13/04/12

That’s probably the saddest part of all this. The North Korean people starve while their glorious leader(s) take part in a “who’s rocket is bigger” competition. Unfortunately theirs couldn’t perform. And in the end it will be the people who pay for all this boasting and posturing

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