Dow Jones Industrial Average (.DJI): North Korea and the Fear of Total Destruction

The odds are: that North Korea continues acting out for attention over the next few weeks, the United States and South Korea end their joint exercises on April 30, and the peninsula heads back to the status quo. The world is constantly sitting on the edge of danger, a few unforeseen events away from turning back from the relative peace that’s marked the past half-century. This is just another political crisis, the vast majority of which lead to little to no escalation.

Yet what’s spooky about North Korea is the instability of the leadership, its increasing capabilities, and its ability to inflict massive destruction across somewhere as populated as the Korean Peninsula, an area with more than 75 million people in it.

Aside from artillery pointed at the South, the country continues testing nuclear weapons. Its long-range-missile program has its share of failures, but it continues moving toward intercontinental missiles that could threaten the western United States. To think that these capabilities are in the hands of such a young ruler whose upbringing few know of or understand is truly terrifying.

While we fret about financial weapons of mass destruction today, history’s greatest destroyer of wealth has been the physical kind of destruction. Maybe a world in which the greatest fear is the destruction caused by trillions of dollars’ worth of financial derivatives isn’t so bad after all.

The article North Korea and the Fear of Total Destruction originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Eric Bleeker.

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