N. Korea Bought Arms Despite Woes, Seoul Says
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SEOUL — North Korea has imported $156 million worth of weapons since 1995 despite severe food shortages and economic difficulties, South Korea’s government said Tuesday.
Most of the weapons came from Kazakhstan and other former Soviet republics and from China, Seoul’s Defense Ministry said in a report to the National Assembly.
The communist North spent $12 million this year to buy 40 Soviet-designed MIG-21 fighter planes and eight helicopters from Kazakhstan and Russia, the ministry said.
North Korea stopped buying new weapons in the early 1990s, when communism ended in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the Asian nation’s centrally planned economy collapsed.
But the North began buying conventional weapons again in 1995.
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