In North Korea, missiles and nuclear bombs are more than a means of national defense – they’ re an object of near-religious devotion.
In North Korea, missiles and nuclear bombs are more than a means of national defense — they are, for broad segments of the public, objects of near-religious devotion.
In Pyongyang, the country’s capital, missiles feature constantly in newspapers and on television. They emerge from flower pots in floral exhibitions; loom large in public mosaics; and adorn propaganda posters in factories, farms and schools. They’ re often depicted in mid-flight, framed by bold militaristic slogans.
North Korea is gradually developing the capability to fit a nuclear device on an intercontinental ballistic missile, a technology that could one day enable it to launch a nuclear strike on the U. S., and any other nation that might threaten the survival of the Kim family dynasty.
Yet a close reading of the country’s propaganda suggests that its goals may be more ambitious — and more aggressive in nature — than foreign observers often assume.
One longtime analyst of the secretive country’s murky ideology says it’s become clear that North Korea’s rulers have come to consider nuclear capability not just a means of defense, but the only way of achieving their most important goal: to rid South Korea of U. S. troops, and reunite the Korean peninsula on their own terms.
“North Korea is a radical nationalist state and it’s committed to anything that anybody in North Korea’s position would be — which is the reunification of the [Korean] race, and the reunification of the homeland, ” said B. R. Myers, a professor at Dongseo University in South Korea who has studied the official ideology of self-reliance, known as juche, that has been a fundamental feature of the North Korean state since the 1950s.
Tensions on the Korean peninsula are at their highest point in years. North Korea has conducted five nuclear tests since 2006, and could soon conduct its sixth. Its missile tests have become routine, including another attempted launch Friday. The U. S., in response to North Korean tests and threats, has diverted an aircraft carrier strike group to the Korean peninsula. North Korea, meanwhile, has responded with a massive artillery exercise and warnings of imminent nuclear war.
Why is this happening? The North’s strategic calculus hasn’ t changed in decades, Myers said. In 1994, President Clinton contemplated a preemptive strike on the North’s nuclear weapons program — yet he balked in the face of the potential fallout: North Korea has a devastating array of artillery aimed at Seoul, which sits 35 miles south of the countries’ heavily militarized border, and if a conflict were to erupt, hundreds of thousands of South Koreans could be killed within an hour.
