Washington is already in mini-crisis mode over North Korea’s planned launch of a “satellite” (actually, an intercontinental ballistic missile)...Now comes word from South Korea that Pyongyang may also be planning another nuclear test.

The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) and AEI will be launching a new HRNK report entitled, “Marked For Life: Songbun, North Korea’s Social Classification System,” which will be discussed at this event. The panel will also examine the extent to which the growing reliance on money and bribery is eroding the songbun system’s influence.

Ever since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has maintained an aggressive and bellicose international security posture. Today, fully two decades after the end of the Cold War, North Korea's external defense and security policies look arguably more extreme and anomalous than ever.

Despite having little demonstrable interest in giving up its nuclear weapons, North Korea is once again headed for a negotiating table to do just that. That the North Koreans have been invited at all is a testament to the strange desperation of both the Obama administration and the South Korean Lee Myung-bak administration to return to the Six Party Talks.

Barack Obama’s presidency has had profoundly negative consequences for our national security. From debilitating cuts in defense budgets, to gutting national missile defense efforts, to his unwillingness to acknowledge a continuing war against terrorism, to his inability to stem the nuclear proliferation threats posed by North Korea and Iran....the picture is bleak.

Much has been written over the years on the geopolitical, security, legal, institutional, economic, and policy requisites for success in a hypothetical Korean reunification. One issue that has attracted much less attention is the role that human resources may play in any prospective reintegration of the still-divided Korean nation.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (also known as the DPRK, and North Korea) is a special case in the annals of modern economic development, and not a good one: for it is an economy that once achieved a relatively advanced level of modernization, but then proceeded into prolonged, even catastrophic decline.

It’s folly to expect Beijing to seriously help in curbing Pyongyang.