By This news shouldn’t surprise anyone other then my initial though of, that’s all they spent?:
Poverty-stricken North Korea purchased foreign weapons systems worth $65 million over the past five years despite its lingering food crisis, a lawmaker of the governing Grand National Party (GNP) said Monday.
Quoting documents submitted by intelligence authorities for a parliamentary audit of government agencies, Rep. Kwon Young-se of the conservative GNP said the North spent an annual $13 million on weapons from China, Russia, Slovakia and Germany over the past five years.
Kwon, a member of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs and Trade, Unification Committee, raised suspicion that South Korea’s aid programs during the liberal Roh Moo-hyun administration could be linked to the North’s weapons purchase. [Korea Times]
Keep in min this $65 million is only for foreign weapons purchases. I suspect much of the so called aid money from the Roh Moo-hyun years was used to develop their domestic ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs that made large advances during the Roh Moo-hyun administration.
11:09 pm on October 12th, 2008 1
[...] By comparison, the North had received just under $200 million in food aid from the World Food Program annually at the peak of WFP operations in 2005. For more context, the USA Today link above estimates North Korea’s “national income,” which I suppose means something similar to GDP, at about $26 bilion; however, Nicholas Eberstadt would tell you that the actual figure would be about twice that if it included the North’s illicit income. I have seen various experts estimate that North Korea spends about 30% of its budget on the military, although no one can claim to have an authoritative figure or source for it. See also ROK Drop. [...]