What's North Korea thinking? Ask the Monitor

Few places in the world are as isolated and odd as North Korea.

A hard-line communist dictatorship ruled by one family for more than half a century, North Korea regularly hurls bombastic threats at South Korea, Japan, and the United States. With its nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, its belligerent rhetoric is now backed up by deadly force.

What makes North Korea tick? You can ask longtime Monitor Korea correspondent Don Kirk at 1 pm (EDT) on Thursday. He'll be joined by Gordon Lubold, the Monitor's Pentagon correspondent, who is keeping an eye on the military threat and US options. Monitor editor John Yemma hosts the "Talk to the Editor" webcast and will be joined by deputy international editor Amelia Newcomb, who has specialized in Asia.

The conversation will be webcast in this blog via Ustream. You can watch it live here.

Send your questions to us:

- via Twitter at #csmonitor

- by posting on the Monitor wall on Facebook.

- by submitting a comment below

Ustream will be featuring the 1 pm Thursday webcast live on its site (we’ll embed it on this blog afterwards so you can catch up if you missed the webcast). You can also download a Ustream application for your iPhone at the Ustream site.

Some early questions have come in. You can preview them here.