"Andrei Nikolaevich Lankov" is a Russian scholar of Asia and a specialist in Korean studies.

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They (the U.S.) could do nothing but wait until the regime collapses, or they could attack, which could be a very bloody war.

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There are very few cases of a young, educated, middle-class North Korean defector who would get a good South Korean education and then make what would seem as a 'normal' career in the South.

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The 2002 reforms were just a recognition of changes that had happened already. It's not reform in any meaningful sense, there was just a disintegration of the state.

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For decades, this country was second only to Albania, or even second to none, for keeping out all information about foreign countries. But the old state supervision, where the police would do random checks looking for things like radios, collapsed over the last decade. It was too expensive to run.

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