How much would it cost?

The total area is something like 50,000 square miles and lots of those miles are too rugged to use for anything useful. You can't grow things. You can't mine things. You can't live there.

How much would worthless land like that cost?

Let's see. 50,000 square miles is 32,000 acres. You can get 30 acres in rural Tennessee for $285,000. So, if we add three zeroes to that, maybe 32,000 acres would be a little more than $285,000,000--in really round figures, of course. Let's call it $300 million, for the sake of argument.

A thousand acres in the outback of Mexico is currently going for $550,000. That times three is 1,650,000. Add a zero to bring it up to 30,000 and we've got a price tag of $16,500,000. Not even $20 million. More affordable? Sure!

The land I'm talking about is a little farther than Mexico and a lot farther than Tennessee. It is the entire country of North Korea.

Wouldn't it be a better bargain to just buy the place outright than to keep pouring money into military options?

For mere millions--not the billions that are drained away from health and education spending by a voracious military budget--we could buy North Korea, evict the current landlord, and sleep well at night without worrying about missiles and nuclear testing. I say, let's buy it.