Say you’re a ruthless narcissist and a natural-born dictator and you’re reviewing footage of this month’s presidential debate in Philadelphia. It’s obvious that you got far too little time during the sparring and inspired not nearly as much fear and awe as are your due. So you decide to spring your "October surprise.”
I’m not talking about former and perhaps future U.S. President Donald Trump, but about North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. All sorts of topics are hogging the news cycles in this election season — the Middle East, for example, where war is now being waged with exploding pagers. But Kim isn’t one of them, even though he’s one of the biggest threats to the United States and world peace. He may feel that a reminder is in order. What could that look like?
This month North Korea released the first-ever photographs of Kim walking past rows and rows of the spinning centrifuges that enrich the uranium which goes into the DPRK’s nuclear warheads. Defying decades’ worth of United Nations resolutions, he has already expanded his arsenal to about 80 or 90 nukes, according to South Korean estimates, and keeps adding as fast as he can.
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