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Time to stop rewarding contemptuous behaviour

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The North Korean missile test raises a critical question. Why should anyone consider giving aid to those people when they squander hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars by firing off missiles and fabricating nuclear weapons?

Here's an impoverished country, the single biggest recipient of aid from the World Food Programme, where half the people are underfed if not starving, many of them suffering from diseases of every conceivable variety, hundreds of thousands consigned under unspeakable conditions to a vast prison system, and world leaders wonder whether to ply them with billions more.

Such thinking is not only ridiculous; it has no chance of working.

It's mind-boggling to imagine any one could have fallen for North Korea's promises yet again, but, nearly three years ago, there was Christopher Hill, the US nuclear envoy at the time, falling for the claim North Korea would abide by its latest agreements to give up its nukes and missiles after the North went ahead and conducted an underground nuclear test. No way, of course, would North Korea abide by the promises made in 2007, much less destroy or surrender the six to 12 warheads it's already made. The latest evidence, as everyone knows, was the test flight on Sunday of a Taepodong-2 missile that's got a range of at least 3,200km.

Oh sure, the North Koreans went through an elaborate exercise of claiming the missile was really a two-stage booster rocket assembly from which a communications satellite would loft into orbit. That was the same claim they made in 1998 when they fired a Taepodong-1 in much the same trajectory over northern Japan. North Korea claimed then, as now, that the missile had shot a satellite into space from which wafted patriotic paeans to Dear Leader Kim Jong-il and his late father, Kim Il-sung, 'eternal president'.

It's very dubious if the attachment picked up by satellite imagery at the tip of the missile while poised on the launch pad was anything like a satellite. Far more likely, North Koreans were bamboozling the world in a shell game that would be funny if the implications were not so deadly.

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