Posted on 07/30/2018 9:49:28 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
It was revealed recently that North Korea is sitting on approximately $6 trillion worth of natural resources, which the country lacks the technology or expertise to extract. The impoverished nation is quite literally sitting on a goldmine, a significant portion of which is made up of rare earth metals.
Rare earth metals are not - as you would expect - exceptionally rare, but are generally found in small trace quantities underground. What is rare is to find them in high concentrations, which is exactly what experts believe is present beneath the soil of North Korea.
Not only are these resources difficult to obtain, they’re also crucial to many of our most advanced technologies. “The magnetic and conductive properties of these elements allow our modern technologies to be lighter, faster, and stronger, making them more efficient,” says Dr. Julie Michelle Klinger, an assistant professor of international relations at Boston University's Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. Among other things, they’re used in MRI scanners, cancer treatment drugs, nuclear reactor shielding, aircraft engines and smartphones....
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
How disastrous Communism is, that it turns wealths of opportunities into famines.
Didn’t this same story run several years back. They just substituted N. Korea for Afghanistan in the text........
South Korea is a tech giant and North Korea already has a master hacking/cyber warfare culture. Not sure about Afghanistan.
Don’t we have tons of these elements? Aren’t we stymied by anti-human “environmentalists” and Federal restrictions on mining?
Yes.
The US mines have been shut down, so the Chinese mines can increase their pollution (and profits) without competition.
Could there be minerals and rare earth ores under the NorK land?
A definite maybe.
I agree that mining could be huge - hopefully for OUR side and not the Chinese. South Korean estimates of NORK minerals is $6 to $10 trillion dollars.
It actually isn’t the stupendous ‘untapped goldmine’ as the title suggests, for a variety of reasons. Sounds like Forbes likes to publish essentially investment-porn.
It’s not a real Forbes article. If the URL has /sites/ in it then it is just a Forbes hosted blog. They are not overly picky on whom they give these addresses.
I think N.+ S. Korea have an almost unlimited labor supply. One of the main reasons for tapping into this goldmine ASAP is to keep China out.
Re post 5. Yes.
Yes, the biggest “gold mine” is not minerals in the earth, but the huge human potential of the North Korean people.
No doubt, in a generation they can become a tech superpower like South Korea is.
By chance I watched a show on Netflix yesterday evening called “Life’s Rocky Start” produced by NOVA. Fascinating look at the 6 phases of the earth’s evolution, how without minerals life as we know it wouldn’t exist on our planet.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/life-rocky-start.html
So Forbes is touting the crony capitalist line to sell an “opening” with North Korea, the way they tried to sell Obama’s opening to Castro.
“Liberalization” in the economic sense has not changed China one bit politically, and its not going to. The fruits of China’s modernization are all in the hands of the party and used to modernize and improve its control. The same, or worse, is how North Korea would go.
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