This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 11th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

North Korea has said the armistice ending the Korean War no longer applies.

It would seem to be a threatening gesture aimed at restarting armed, possibly nuclear

hostilities, except for one thing. The North Koreans did the same thing in 2009 to no great

fanfare. Doug Bandau, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute,

argues that North Korea, for better or worse, is playing a weak hand very well.

Well, North Korea is getting everybody excited, it's threatening nuclear war,

talking about preemptively attacking the United States, it's threatening nuclear war talking about preemptively attacking the United States,

it's threatening South Korea, it's said the armistice no longer applies.

So what we're seeing in many ways is standard North Korean behavior kind of on steroids where they've long

been threatening and now they seem to be hyper-threatening and at some point I

think people are getting nervous. Now is the fact that we don't know much

about Kim Jong-un is that at all playing into the calculus here in terms

of being concerned about it or not being concerned about it?

Well what plays into it really is the fact that we don't know much about North Korea and

the fact it's been around for 50 years, we still don't know very much about it.

And Kim Jong-un, he's the new guy.

We don't really know if he's in charge.

We don't know exactly who's calling the shots in North Korea.

All of that's cause for concern.

The primary reason though, I think it's the Hermit Kingdom.

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