Missiles Paid for with Other People's Coins

A bank back office at night: a desk lamp lights a printer that has spilled a long folded strip of paper onto the floor, empty chairs around. — February 2016, the Central Bank of Bangladesh: thirty-five orders for almost a billion dollars. Eighty-one million got through; people at the other end stopped the rest.

Sanctions have cut North Korea off from almost all the money in the world. Banks will not open correspondent accounts for it, Visa cards are useless in Pyongyang, and whatever the country sells abroad has to be smuggled out. On the other hand, it has mathematics schools that select gifted children from the first grades, and an intelligence service where the best of them are taught to write code. By various estimates, thousands of such programmers work for the state, and, if UN experts are to be believed, their work brings the country about half of all its foreign currency.

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