Well put, lil.

You discover that your own computer research or one of your academic colleagues has been developing technology to help North Korea's nuclear program. What do you do?

Well, neither the US nor Canada currently has diplomatic relations with North Korea so hopefully they'd report it to the FBI or CSIS respectively or face prosecution for espionage. But beyond that:

I'm actually at peace with North Korea having nukes.

Casual observers want to interpret North Korea as a country. It's more like a cult, if a cult could have about as many people in it as Texas. Of the tens of millions of people in North Korea, a tiny, tiny fraction of them matter and the rest of them are brainwashed and downtrodden.

The Kims have created an abject horrorshow in North Korea... for the people that don't matter. For the people that do, the nomenklatura, the party elites, they've created a self-perpetuating system that ensures luxury and continuity amongst abject poverty and Carpathian horror. In order for that system to persist, however, they have to convince the rest of the world that the easiest thing is to leave it alone.

And they're running out of time. Their real GDP peaked in 1992 and has never recovered. Trade with South Korea took a big hit in 2010. They're facing another famine. The last one, by the way, killed between a quarter million and 3.5 million people, the kind of precision you get from an administration whose best interests lie in a total and utter lack of accountability.

And Kim Jong-un was trained in Switzerland. He's not a savage from the orient. He's the head of a cult that rules the world's 4th largest army through terror and reprisal. Any student of history would look squarely at the USSR and recognize that the Hungarian uprising was the direct consequence of added liberties under Khrushchev after Stalin's death. Dictatorships are like snakes - as soon as you release your grip even a tiny amount it'll swing around and strike you.

At some point, the snake strikes anyway. The USSR is gone. Mussolini is gone. Saddam Hussein is gone. Moammar Qaddhafi is gone. Ceaucescu is gone. Castro... lived to 90 but he also didn't run his country on terror. Honecker made it out. Idi Amin made it out. Ferdinand Marcos made it out. So you can make it out.

But you can't make it out if they aren't willing to deal with you as an equal.

North Korea wants to be a power the world has to deal with, not a country we can invade. They're not fighting for world domination, they're fighting for status quo. if they get their grain shipments back, if they get concessions in exchange for curbing their nuclear ambitions. They want a stick big enough that we have to pay them rather than clobber them.

'cuz the thing about nukes is they only have power as long as you (1) are willing to use them and (2) never use them. North Korea isn't talking about suitcase nukes, they aren't talking about tactical battlefield nukes, they're demonstrating that they've got a 100kT weapon they can loft.

And there are entire departments in Washington that know this.

It's not just these nuclear threats. What little I know of the North Korean camps has me convinced that something should be done, yet I don't see a good path to a solution.