“Do those hand-wringers actually expect a true tyrant and his paranoid nation to start spending money they don’t have to destroy what they didn’t have money to build (without starving their populace)?”
No, because they saw what happened to Sadaam and Muammar when they got rid of their nukes.
If it’s true that NKorea is a puppet of Beijing (as some say), then money would probably not be an issue.
Geo-spatial input -- worth mega-thousand words:
TXnMA