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Why Analysts Aren't Laughing At These Silly North Korean Photos

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Bruce Klingner knows better than anyone how dangerous North Korea really is. He spent years analyzing the Hermit Kingdom for the CIA, and he now works as a Northeast Asia analyst at the Heritage Foundation.And yet even he finds himself having an occasional chuckle at the North's absurdity. The bombastic rhetoric and over-the-top propaganda are "kind of like 1950s Soviet Union on steroids," he says.The portrayals in films like The Interview and Team America: World Police don't help either: "In the back of your mind, you just have the image of Kim Jong Il's puppet singing 'I'm So Ronery,'" he says.But over the past few months, the experts have pretty much stopped laughing. That's because North Korea has undertaken an unusual number of tests in the first quarter of 2016, everything from detonating a nuclear bomb underground to launching a satellite on a rocket that could be converted to a ballistic missile.Keeping up with the pace of activity is "exhausting, to be honest," says Melissa

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