Category Archives: Burma

Tolkien’s Dwarves With a Slide Projector

Let’s continue with our “examination of North Korean engineering”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2060/nk-engineering-rough-and-ready.

The pictures you see below strongly suggest that North Korean engineers are not primitives by any means. Moreover, when they’ve done something enough, they seem to get pretty good at it. “These and a few other shots”:http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=16186 recently appeared at the website of a Burmese dissident journal, and purport to show North Korean experts training Burmese military engineers and overseeing the construction of tunnel complexes around Naypyidaw, the new capital of Myanmar (Burma). To my eyes, at least, they convey a high level of comfort with modern technologies, and perhaps even a can-do spirit:

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_”A North Korean expert gives a power point presentation at the Naypyidaw meeting.”_

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_”Heavy construction equipment is brought in to clear a mountainside site.”_

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_”Surfaced roads are laid to the site.”_

(That looks like an American-made Caterpillar brand roller, doesn’t it?)

What we see here are merely the early stages. To see further progress at this or a similar site, have a look at this other Burmese dissent website, where still photos of tunneling activity have been “made into a video”:http://english.dvb.no/nkorea-news.php. From the looks of things, any paranoid regime or James Bond villain in need of a subterranean lair could do worse than to make a phone call to Pyongyang.