TY - JOUR
AU - Howell,, Edward
AB - Abstract Existing scholarship on North Korea's nuclear programme remains overwhelmingly centred around questions of containment or engagement with the North Korean regime-state, amid international calls for denuclearization. Yet, scholarship has rarely interrogated the precise value of nuclear weapons to the regime-state. This article develops a new theoretical framework of nuclear ideology to explore the puzzle of the survival of North Korea. This framework aims to show how the North Korean nuclear programme is deeply entrenched within the state ideology of juche, as one device for continued regime-state survival. Through interviews with elite North Korean defectors and textual analysis of North Korean and international sources, I show that North Korea's nuclear ideology has been constructed according to different frames of meaning, targeting referent actors of international ‘enemy’ powers and domestic audiences. This article concludes that nuclear ideology functions primarily as a tool to arouse domestic legitimacy for the North Korean regime-state, by targeting elite actors within the highly stratified domestic population. From an international perspective, perception of North Korea's survival remains tied largely to the regime-state's physical possession of nuclear weapons. This article has extremely timely theoretical and policy implications given the current ‘dialogue’ between US and North Korean leaders. First, it opens up fruitful avenues of inquiry surrounding questions of the legitimacy of rogue states within international relations. Secondly, this article calls for a more robust understanding of the domestic-level politics of North Korea, in order to understand the regime-state's foreign policy decisions vis-à-vis its nuclear programme. Why do we ‘keep getting North Korea wrong’,1 or at least only partly correct? While this regime-state2 has become associated, if not synonymous, with its development and possession of nuclear weapons, understandings of the motivations behind its nuclear programme have been overwhelmingly confined to the international level. There remains little understanding of the domestic underpinnings, and impacts, of North Korea's nuclear programme, despite claims that nuclear weapons perpetuate the survival of the ruling regime. This article asks how North Korea's nuclear programme interacts with its state ideology as a means of supporting the survival of the regime-state. Although existing literature has moved beyond caricatures of North Korea's regime as ‘mad’ or ‘bad’,3 scholarship and policy-making remain preoccupied with the question of how to address the threat created by North Korea's possession and development of nuclear weapons. Current debates too frequently ask why North Korea decided to acquire weaponized nuclear capability, and whether the international community should ‘contain’ or ‘engage’ this self-declared nuclear state.4 Debates that do interrogate the role of nuclear weapons in perpetuating North Korea's regime survival, however, remain confined to the level of the international system. As the then US Director of National Intelligence stated in 2017, North Korea's nuclear capabilities are ‘intended for deterrence, international prestige, and coercive diplomacy’.5 At the same time, ‘North Korean leaders view nuclear arms as critical to regime survival’.6 Yet the interconnections between North Korea's domestic sphere and its foreign policy motivations remain insufficiently studied. It is rarely asked how nuclear weapons perpetuate the survival of the North Korean regime-state. This article represents one attempt to fill that gap. The article approaches this puzzle through a theoretical framework of nuclear ideology, which emphasizes the embedding of North Korea's nuclear programme within the state ideology of juche.7 Using this framework, the article aims to bridge the divide between the international and domestic spheres by considering North Korea's nuclear programme in the domestic context of the state.8 Using evidence from interviews with North Korean defectors and international diplomats, together with North Korean and international policy sources, the article argues that North Korea's prolonged survival can be seen as a result of domestic support for the regime-state fuelled by nuclear ideology. In particular, the North Korean regime-state makes particularly effective use of nuclear ideology by targeting elite actors within the highly stratified domestic population. This study has highly significant and timely theoretical and policy implications. First, it opens up fruitful avenues of enquiry regarding the domestic role of nuclear weapons in ‘rogue’ states. Second, it emphasizes that considering the deterrent value of North Korea's nuclear weapons within an international context alone will lead to poor policy-making. Such considerations are particularly pertinent in the light of the Trump administration's focus on the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement (CVID) of the North Korean nuclear programme.9 To overlook the domestic foundations and audiences of the nuclear programme is to ignore a vital element in understanding the motivations behind North Korea's nuclear programme as a means to ensuring regime-state survival. Nuclear weapons and regime survival: the limits of deterrence To fulfil the aim of this study, it is important to interrogate the limitations of existing approaches to the value of nuclear weapons for states, before outlining the framework of nuclear ideology and applying it to the case of North Korea. Existing scholarship within International Relations highlights three main reasons why states develop and acquire nuclear weapons.10 First, nuclear weapons provide security against external threats; second, domestic actors and state leaders may influence the decision to nuclearize; and third, nuclear weapons may serve normative and symbolic functions, as ‘part of what states believe they have to possess to be legitimate, modern states’.11 When considered individually, however, these factors only partially determine the extent to which nuclear development and acquisition affect state survival, and must not be treated in isolation from each other. Debates pertaining to the value of nuclear weapons for states, and the reasons why states wish to acquire such weapons, cluster around two themes: deterrence and nuclear non-use. Arguments supporting the role of deterrence in perpetuating regime-state survival stress the value of nuclear weapons in combating external threats to the nuclearizing state. Such arguments are predicated on the destructive capability of nuclear weapons, and the fear of conflict escalation into nuclear war.12 The irreparable economic, military and moral costs and consequences of a nuclear strike—first or second—are enough to dissuade initial usage of nuclear weapons. Rational deterrence theory surmises that nuclear deterrence can minimize the chances of bilateral conflict between two nuclear-armed states, or one state that is nuclear-armed and one that is not, given that the threat of mutually assured destruction supports nuclear acquisition and subsequent non-use.13 Yet this theory also assumes that ‘rogue states’ are undeterrable and irrational. This is not the case with respect to North Korea, especially regarding how the regime-state incorporates its nuclear weapons programme within domestic ideology, to bolster domestic legitimacy. While deterrence may offer a parsimonious explanation for nuclear proliferation, the domestic impacts of nuclear acquisition as a means of sustaining regime-state survival have been overlooked. Although the North Korean regime has described its ‘national nuclear forces’ as a ‘powerful and reliable war deterrent’,14 deterrence cannot provide a full explanation of the value of North Korea's nuclear programme in sustaining the regime. To understand how nuclear weapons contribute to the North Korean regime's survival, it is important to consider their value through a social constructivist approach, emphasizing the role that nuclear weapons can play as a constituent part of state identity. Jacques Hymans's ‘national identity conception’ (NIC) offers one useful heuristic for understanding the role of nuclear weapons as part of a nation-state's identity.15 Reflecting the values for which a nation stands, the NIC emphasizes how the perceptions of a state by domestic and international audiences can prompt state leaders to adopt particular foreign policy behaviours. Among such behaviours are the decisions to acquire nuclear weapons and, having done so, to frame those weapons as an instrumental foreign policy tool central to a state's identity. The value of an NIC in fostering state identity has been applied to Iran's decision to nuclearize, a decision embedded within the leadership's perception of the country as at the vanguard of the global Islamic civilization, and of nuclear weapons as having ‘sacred’ value for Iranian state identity.16 The NIC approach offers insight into how nuclear weapons may be embedded within domestic state discourse, as in North Korea, where the regime and the state remain bound together by nationalism and national ideology, namely juche. Moreover, the role of nuclear weapons as part of state identity may be disseminated across the domestic population through personality cults surrounding state leadership. Personality cults of leaders are common under authoritarian rule, and facilitate the dissemination of state ideology across the population. This phenomenon has been witnessed in Ceausescu's Romania, Castro's Cuba, Mao's China17 and Assad's Syria,18 as well as in North Korea under Kim Il-sung.19 North Korea's personalistic form of leadership allows the Kim regime to use its nuclear weapons programme to bolster domestic legitimacy. Even so, the symbolic power of charismatic authority is insufficient on its own to sustain regime-state survival. Charismatic leadership requires compliance (whether false or genuine) from citizens. For instance, during times of domestic hardship, as in eastern Europe under communism, or in North Korea during the famine of the 1990s, while individuals may express private grievances against the regime-state apparatus, their tolerance of the status quo prolongs regime-state survival, albeit temporarily in the former case. So long as individuals do not deem the public costs of supporting an authoritarian regime to outweigh the private beliefs of opposition to it, regime survival will continue.20 Embedding a state's nuclear doctrine within state ideology represents one possible tool that authoritarian—and totalitarian—regimes can use to justify the cost of nuclear weapons to their populaces, while maintaining domestic support, as seen in North Korea. I term such embedding nuclear ideology. Nuclear ideology (NI) is a system of ideas encompassing the motivations behind a state's adoption of a policy of developing and acquiring nuclear weapons, based in particular on the state's strength, its status and its perception of the role of this system of ideas within both the domestic and the international spheres. This system of ideas can be shaped by domestic politics (such as state nationalism, or a regime's desire to maintain the status quo in terms of its rule over the population), as well as by perceptions of the international environment within which the state is situated. I draw on Leader Maynard's definition of ideology as a ‘distinctive system of normative, semantic, and/or reputedly factual ideas, typically shared by members of groups or societies, which underpins their understandings of their political world and shapes their political behaviour’.21 The ‘reputedly factual’ nature of such ideas is pertinent for North Korea, where the promulgation of a narrative of the state's inception that runs counter to international accounts has allowed the incumbent regime to maintain ideological control over its population. The process of NI operates in four steps. First, the state's reasons for developing and acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are discussed in parallel with national ideology within the regime. Second, this discourse is used to appeal to the domestic population through state rhetoric and the indoctrination of citizens into ideological virtues. The regime-state can disseminate this ideology through a personality cult of leadership, to justify the necessity of the ideology to the regime's continued survival. Third, since the state's nuclear doctrine is an essential component of the ideology, the diffusion of ideology across the nation can translate into domestic belief in the nuclear doctrine as part and parcel of that ideology. In the fourth step, through the incorporation of nuclear doctrine within ideology, the regime-state gains the acquiescence of, and legitimation by, the domestic population. NI has both domestic and international impacts. Domestically, regime-states draw on NI to secure popular support and to justify the state's position as a legitimate actor in the international sphere. A regime-state can combine domestic support with narratives of population control and territorial sovereignty to advance this goal, as is common in authoritarian states.22 By reinforcing the legitimacy of the state as sovereign, domestic legitimacy can catalyse international legitimacy. The interaction of these two elements may explain the survival of North Korea, whereby the regime has repeatedly asserted that its ‘cause’ is ‘supported by the people’.23 At the international level, the regime-state can use such domestic legitimation to justify its right to existence, and invoke international norms of sovereignty to frame its WMD development as an ‘appropriate measure vis-à-vis the hostile acts against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea’.24 NI can have two possible effects regarding international perceptions of a state's survival. First, it can reinforce the role of deterrence in sustaining the regime-state, which, in respect of a non-legal nuclear weapon state,25 may lead to international perceptions of the state as ‘rogue’. Second, it can exacerbate differences in perceptions between international actors regarding regime-state legitimacy. For instance, in the case of North Korea, while the United States and China agree on the importance of peace and stability on the Korean peninsula, they differ in their perceptions of the regime-state, with China frequently reluctant to impose sanctions—or to abide by sanctions which it has agreed to enforce—on North Korea. To examine how NI may contribute to the survival of the North Korean regime-state, it is important to consider the core ideology, juche, underpinning North Korean domestic politics. North Korea, ideology and nuclear weapons Juche ideology emerged under Kim Il-sung, following the inception of the North Korean state in 1948, and in the aftermath of the Korean War (1950–53).26 Crucially, the Korean War ended not in a peace treaty, but in an armistice agreement signed by the United States (on behalf of the UN Forces Command), North Korea and the People's Republic of China. The North Korean narrative of the Korean War runs counter to that espoused by the international community, blaming the war on US and South Korean forces bombarding North Korea.27 North Korea refers to the war as the ‘Victorious Fatherland Liberation War’, perceiving the armistice as the United States' acknowledgement of its ‘ignominious defeat’.28 The US threat to use nuclear weapons on North Korea during the war is likely to have contributed to Kim Il-sung's decision to attempt to acquire nuclear weapons to ensure regime survival against external threats.29 After the war, juche offered one means to disseminate, domestically, this perception of external threat from the United States and South Korea, given the changing geopolitical environment in which North Korea was situated. Juche means ‘agency’ but is often translated as ‘self-reliance’.30 Central to the concept is the axiom that ‘man is the master of his own destiny’,31 itself interwoven with the notion of political self-determination (jajusong), which became a cornerstone of Kim Il-sung's leadership. Juche emphasized the prioritization of the North Korean ‘self’, in opposition to sadaejuui, referring to reliance on other powers. The development of juche, and its embedding within the North Korean regime-state, occurred alongside the emergence of North Korea's nuclear ambitions. While no single moment can be identified as the point when North Korea decided to nuclearize, Kim Il-sung's nuclear ambitions can be traced to the early 1950s. Soviet–North Korean cooperation in nuclear research throughout the 1950s and 1960s saw the dispatch of North Korean scientists to nuclear institutes in the USSR for ‘training’,32 the construction of the Yongbyon Nuclear Research Centre in 1959, and North Korean requests for technical nuclear assistance from its Soviet ally and from China.33 In 1962, North Korea questioned why the United States was allowed to ‘have a large stockpile, and we are to be forbidden even to think about the manufacture of nuclear weapons’.34 Such sentiments epitomized a core aim of juche—and of North Korea's nuclear programme: namely, North Korea's desire to elude any hegemonic ambitions of its ‘enemy’, the United States. Following China's nuclear test in 1964, to which North Korea reacted with envy,35 North Korean Vice-Premier Jeong Il-yong stressed that North Korea would ‘be even more formidable when we have powerful weapons in our hands’.36 It is unclear whether North Korea's nuclear ambitions were solely focused on weaponized capability, or partly on peaceful nuclear energy. Even after the USSR supplied a ‘small two- to four-megawatt research reactor’ to Yongbyon, in 1965,37 North Korea continued to request cooperation in nuclear development from communist states.38 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, North Korea became engulfed in a changing regional and international geopolitical environment, marked by the Sino-Soviet split, an increased US nuclear presence in South Korea and South Korea's own nuclear ambitions. During these years North Korea placed greater emphasis on applying juche in practical terms, strengthening ambitions for an indigenous nuclear doctrine, as a means of regime survival.39 Alexandre Mansourov highlights Kim Il-sung's sense of betrayal at South Korea's nuclear aspirations, perceiving ‘the only potential target for these nuclear weapons [to be] his own regime’.40 The ‘Juche Constitution’, adopted in 1972, codified juche within North Korean society.41 Regional geopolitics continued to shift against North Korea, with US–South Korean military exercises (‘Team Spirit’) commencing in 1977: North Korea dismissed, and continues to denounce, these as ‘war games’.42 In 1980, juche was internalized in three components of the state at the Sixth Workers' Party Congress: national self-defence (jawi), political self-determination (jaju) and economic self-sufficiency (jarip).43 To this end, nuclear weapons offered one path towards ‘exercis[ing] complete sovereignty and equal rights in foreign relations’.44 Yet Kim Il-sung's focus on self-defence—through nuclear development—to achieve self-determination often came at the cost of economic performance.45 In 1985 North Korea acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), on condition that the USSR agreed to ‘help the North build [a] nuclear power plant’,46 amid growing international speculation that North Korea was producing an indigenous nuclear reactor.47 A few years later came a critical juncture for North Korea's nuclear development, and the application of juche for the purposes of regime survival, with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the USSR, and the decision by China and Russia to establish relations with what Pyongyang viewed as the ‘puppet state’ of South Korea.48 No longer could North Korea rely on its allies for political and economic assistance. Following Kim Il-sung's death in 1994, juche became a common narrative uniting successive leaders of the ‘Kim Dynasty’, encapsulated within the notion of the suryong or ‘great leader’.49 The first power transition, to Kim Jong-il, emphasized that ‘there is nothing more important [to the North Korean regime] than the hereditary succession of power’.50 Regime survival ‘has always been the number one priority’ of North Korea,51 suggesting a willingness to do anything to fulfil this aim, including developing nuclear weapons and integrating its nuclear doctrine with state ideology. While the importance of juche in domestic and foreign policy-making within North Korean state organs remains unclear,52 the ideology continues to be invoked by the regime-state in parallel with the state's nuclear doctrine.53 Having traced the evolution of juche, and North Korea's nuclear ambitions, in the next section of the article I will explore how the regime-state frames its nuclear ideology to target domestic and international audiences and thereby to ensure its own survival. Nuclear ideology and regime-state survival NI can serve the continuation of the North Korean regime through three processes: framing North Korea in opposition to the United States; mobilizing broad domestic legitimacy for the regime; and targeting specific subsets of the population to sustain legitimacy. This section analyses how each of these processes contributes to regime-state survival, before asking whether NI may affect international perceptions of North Korea's survival. North Korea versus the enemy Since its inception, and particularly since the Korean War, the North Korean regime-state has, through its state discourse, positioned itself in opposition to the United States as its primary adversary, framing America in derogatory terms. In 1958, Kim Il-sung urged the Workers' Party of Korea to ‘imbue the people with hatred for US imperialism’.54 State media have berated America's possession of nuclear weapons, considering this a justification for North Korea's own nuclear development. The Pyongyang Times has declared that the United States holds on to nuclear weapons as a ‘pillar in realizing its strategy for world domination’,55 juxtaposing its ‘nukes of tyranny’ with North Korea's defensive ‘nukes of justice’.56 Such comparisons help to maintain the loyalty of the population, including that of regime elites, by encouraging domestic unity against an external enemy.57 Moreover, the United States is often criticized as exploiting its position as a ‘legal’ nuclear weapon state under the NPT to victimize North Korea. These portrayals allow the North Korean regime to justify its development of nuclear weapons by arguing that ‘the nuclear issue of the Korean Peninsula was created as a result of the United States' constant threats to the sovereignty and security of our people’,58 and have strengthened the intertwining of its national ideology with its nuclear ambitions, in line with the first stage of the NI framework. Another narrative from the early North Korean regime-state is the hope of a ‘peaceful reunification’ of the Korean peninsula.59 In line with the second stage of NI, invocations of the Korean nation, and the prospect of reunification, are used to justify domestically the importance of juche, and nuclear development, to the survival of the regime-state. The North Korean regime-state has also appealed to alleged provocations to war on the Korean peninsula, in response to US behaviour and rhetoric. North Korea has often declared the peninsula to be in a ‘state of war’, for example following the commencement of US–South Korean military exercises or the imposition of UN sanctions.60 Defector testimonies suggest how these appeals to war, through invoking notions of national identity, mobilize domestic support for the regime-state, as the third and fourth steps of the NI framework show. As one defector stated: ‘North Koreans want reunification and the alleged “nuclear war” between the US and North Korea to be over.’61 Framing the United States as the enemy of the North Korean state resonates with North Korea's historical feeling of betrayal at the hands of foreign powers, from which policies such as songun (‘military-first’) emerged in the 1990s under Kim Jong-il. Incorporated into the constitution in 1994, the concept of songun emphasized the primacy of the military in North Korean society, in order to maintain independence through national self-defence.62 Under Kim Jong-un, ensuring political independence from ‘foreign forces’ has been a key goal of North Korea's nuclear doctrine.63 Moreover, the invocation of nuclear and missile capabilities as a product of a ‘Juche Korea’64 facing a hostile international community has reinforced the embedding of nuclear development within state ideology, in line with the fourth stage of NI. As one elite defector emphasized, North Korea's nuclear programme has served both domestic and international purposes: ‘North Korea has to have WMD to sustain their regime. They don't need to attack South Korea, but they need to show off that they have the capacity to attack the USA.’65 Hence, presenting North Korea as a victimized state within a discriminatory US-led international order provides the domestic population with a cause around which to rally in support of the regime-state's nuclear programme. As another defector put it: ‘[Having] nuclear weapons is the only way in which Kim Jong-un can get legitimacy from his people, by saying that nuclear weapons will protect them from external threats.’66 Yet the process through which nuclear weapons generate domestic legitimacy is frequently overlooked in discussions of North Korea's nuclear programme. Nuclear ideology and domestic legitimacy By justifying its acquisition of nuclear capability in terms of nationalism, pride and self-reliance, the North Korean regime-state reinforced domestic perceptions of it as legitimate. This was particularly pertinent regarding the domestic population's agreement with the state's declared reasons for its nuclear programme, as a positive, defensive force against external enemies. As one defector remarked: ‘Kim Jong-un and his aides welcome nuclear weapons … some North Koreans think that nuclear weapons are not weapons for the perpetuation of the Kim regime, but for the prevention of South Korean and US aggression.’67 After a nuclear test or missile launch, the North Korean regime-state would not only frame its nuclear capabilities as successful displays of self-defence against a hostile US-led global order, but would also extol the moral greatness of the North Korean nation-state. Yet domestic legitimacy was not gained simply by juxtaposing the North Korean ‘self’ against an enemy ‘other’. Emphasizing the indigeneity of the North Korean nuclear programme encouraged domestic support for the prowess of North Korean scientists, as fellow citizens. For instance, following the first nuclear test on 9 October 2006, state media stressed that the nuclear bomb had been constructed with ‘indigenous wisdom and technology 100 per cent’, at a time when ‘all the people of the country are making a great leap forward in the building of a great prosperous powerful socialist nation’.68 Interviews with defectors corroborate the assertion that reference to grand overarching ideas of the state as protector of national sovereignty and defence, together with idolization of the Kim family, strengthened popular support for the regime, through NI.69 The leader, presented as an omnipotent and benevolent force for the North Korean nation, was pivotal to fostering domestic dissemination of nuclear ideology, highlighted in stage three of the NI framework.70 Another means of sustaining legitimacy for the regime was the adoption by each leader of a slogan to mobilize the North Korean nation around a common goal. For Kim Il-sung, this was the notion of ‘socialist paradise’;71 for Kim Jong-il, the need to build a ‘strong and prosperous nation’;72 and for Kim Jong-un, until 2018, the byungjin policy of simultaneous nuclear and economic development.73 Robert Jervis cautions against analyses that focus on the influence of the state leader, through his or her individual personality, on domestic and foreign policy.74 Yet the unique context of the North Korean domestic political system, and its propagation of the ‘ubiquitous’ personality cult of the leader throughout the nation-state,75 render Jervis's concerns less appropriate in respect of North Korea. NI, then, gained greater power when invoked along with broader narratives of state sovereignty, national defence and protection of the North Korean people, which in turn reinforced the regime's domestic legitimacy. As one elite defector mentioned, with reference to contemporary North Korea: ‘Even though a lot of North Koreans dislike Kim Jong-un, he is not doing all mad things. Nuclear weapons are something to be proud of!’76 Such sentiments corroborate the historical desire of North Korea, in the 1970s and 1980s, to develop nuclear weapons to generate national pride, prestige and support for the Kim regime.77 It is important, however, to interrogate this ‘domestic legitimacy’ narrative surrounding the survival of North Korea's regime-state, in the light of claims that it is sustained solely through ‘rule by fear and nuclear threat’.78 Although the extent to which juche is internalized by North Koreans is questionable, not least among those who have been exposed to outside information,79 the malleability and ambiguity of juchehave only strengthened the ability of the regime-state to disseminate the ideology across society. As one defector commented: ‘The North Korean state mixes it with everything, whether Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un, or nuclear weapons.’80 Hence, despite low levels of internalization among particular population subgroups, embedding the nuclear doctrine within broader notions of juche relating to the nation-state—such as self-determination—bolstered its domestic legitimacy, even if belief in the ideology was scant. This can be seen as embodying the fourth step of the NI framework. As one non-elite defector mentioned, regarding belief in juche during the late 1990s: ‘I thought, just like everybody else, that nuclear weapons protected our country … At the same time, I was not interested in nuclear weapons. If we died from famine, and we died from nuclear war, it would be the same result.’81 However, the North Korean domestic population should not be considered as a homogeneous actor when analysing the ability of nuclear weapons to enhance the regime's domestic legitimacy; nor should it be assumed that either juche or NI is comprehensively internalized by the population. On the contrary, it is important to consider the distinct social and class-based distinctions within North Korean society. Nuclear ideology: targeting the elites or the masses? The social stratification characterizing North Korean society provides a highly important lens through which to analyse the domestic effect of nuclear ideology. The classification of North Korean citizens according to social class, based on political proximity to the regime (seongbun) and wealth, has allowed the regime-state to target its dissemination of NI at particular population subgroups. Military elites played a more direct role in sustaining regime-state survival than lower-level officials and citizens of lower seongbun. Described as ‘unified in their desire to perpetuate their hold on power’,82 military elites—within the Korean People's Army—are considered by the regime-state to be ‘strongest in ideology, unity and militancy’, and accordingly are targeted in the context of NI.83 A South Korean government official noted that the North Korean leadership does ‘everything to capture the hearts and minds of the military’.84 For instance, it was reported that Kim Jong-il did not wish to develop—or test—nuclear weapons in 2006, but ‘because he needed military support to remain in power himself … Kim had to go along with the military's desire to test its nuclear weapons’.85 An elite defector corroborated this observation: ‘Bureaucrats and military elites understand more than anyone how the system works. Even though many elites are pretending to support Kim Jong-un, nuclear bombs are the only way they can rely on legitimacy for the regime.’86 While evidence from elite defectors challenges the idea that all elite North Korean citizens have internalized belief in juche, NI crucially facilitates mutual loyalty between military elites and the suryong, thus sustaining the regime-state domestically. In contrast, non-elite North Koreans may exhibit greater apathy towards the proclamations of the regime-state. For this group, the value of juche is little more than nominal—not least because of the growing access to external information infiltrating North Korea. Thus a mismatch is arising between the tenets of juche and the situation on the ground, as several defectors suggest. Rising cynicism among non-elites towards juche and its perceived lack of relevance to contemporary North Korean society may be contributing to the declining influence among younger North Koreans of the regime-state's nuclear ideology. As one young North Korean stated: ‘Juche may work among 50- to 60-year-olds [but] it does not have power any more.’87 Interestingly, the ability of juche to affect individual belief in the North Korean regime may have been greater during the early Kim Il-sung era. Nevertheless, a lack of belief in the tenets of juche among the non-elite population did not preclude their continued acquiescence in the regime, owing to what Timur Kuran terms ‘preference falsification’.88 That is, the survival of the existing regime was seen as tolerable by comparison with the likely costs of public dissent. Furthermore, rising indifference towards juche among non-elite groups did not diminish the effectiveness of the regime-state's embedding of its nuclear doctrine within juche, or the ability of NI to sustain regime-state survival. In line with the four stages of NI, it can be seen that the intersections between juche and North Korea's nuclear ambitions—from their origins after the creation of the North Korean state—have become more profound over time. The first stage of NI was witnessed in North Korea's investing its nuclear weapons with the tenets of juche, and with broader notions of sovereignty, territory, self-defence and national destiny. Positioning North Korea as situated within a hostile international order—in opposition to the US ‘enemy’—entrenched this embedding of the regime-state's nuclear ambitions and development within juche. In the second stage of NI, the embedding of North Korea's nuclear doctrine within juche, through the personality cult of the leader, facilitated domestic dissemination of the key tenets of juche. Integrating juche with broader principles of state sovereignty, a hostile international environment and Korean nationhood fosters support for the nuclear doctrine as an essential part of state ideology. In the third stage of NI, these processes entrenched the domestic legitimacy of the Kim regime, through the comprehensive dissemination by the regime-state of its NI throughout its population. Generating acquiescence in North Korea's nuclear doctrine as an essential part of juche, therefore, lends legitimacy to the regime-state and, in the fourth stage of NI, sustains regime-state survival. As defector testimonies show, domestic legitimacy can still be granted despite waning belief in juche, especially given the regime-state's targeting of NI on key population subgroups. Nuclear ideology: beyond the domestic sphere Beyond the domestic sphere, international perceptions of North Korea's behaviour remain centred on the state's physical possession of nuclear weapons, failing to address how the North Korean nuclear programme is incorporated within domestic ideology. North Korea's framing of its grievances against the international system in terms that make the state's pursuit of nuclear weapons a rational decision renders the question of the regime-state's survival a complex issue for the international community. International perceptions focus on the way in which deterrence keeps nuclear threats in check, especially in avoiding escalatory conflict with the United States, and on the considerations of international status that may underlie North Korea's motives for nuclear development. Consideration of juche has remained confined to analyses of the domestic politics of the ‘modern day hermit kingdom’,89 with little attempt to analyse how ideology may interact with the state's nuclear programme. This could be partly due to the overwhelming focus by international policy-makers on the risks of conflict escalation, should force ever be used by the United States or its allies in response to North Korea's nuclear behaviour. International perceptions of North Korea's survival are far from uniform. Coupled with the focus of attention on the physical capabilities of North Korea's nuclear arsenal, the lack of consensus on how the international community might accommodate the North Korean regime has preoccupied policy debates, at the expense of considering the significance of domestic factors, such as NI. There remains no common international position regarding responses towards North Korea's nuclear programme, not least among the Great Powers. The United States supports enforcement of unilateral and UN Security Council sanctions in addition to deterrence, and while tolerating maintenance of the status quo in North Korea in the short term, yearns for longer-term change. China supports stability on the Korean peninsula, and has called for the disarmament of North Korea's nuclear arsenal; yet, in the light of the close Sino-North Korean relationship, once described by Mao as being ‘as close as lips and teeth’,90 China has expressed reluctance to see stringent multilateral sanctions applied on North Korea, and has avoided voicing outright condemnation of North Korea's nuclear and missile tests.91 The recent oscillation of North Korean summitry between China and the United States is testament to the Pyongyang regime's awareness of the differences between Chinese and US perceptions of the North Korean regime-state.92 Exploiting this Great Power cleavage, at a time when the gap between Chinese and US perspectives on North Korea's survival remains, will only prolong the survival of the status quo in North Korea. Conclusions Nuclear ideology provides a useful, overlooked heuristic to aid academic and policy understandings of North Korea. By highlighting the intersections between the domestic and international levels of analysis, and encouraging a focus on the North Korean domestic ideology, this article has aimed to shed light on why we keep ‘getting North Korea wrong’. The ‘intermestic’93 nexus between domestic and international spheres is frequently overlooked in analyses that approach North Korea's nuclear programme from an international perspective. Yet such interlinkages cannot be ignored if we are to properly understand the survival of North Korea, given how tightly intertwined the two realms are in the regime-state. As this article has shown, although NI may have predominantly domestic impacts, the concept has wide heuristic value. NI opens up interesting avenues for future enquiry with respect to whether other countries care about how North Korea presents its foreign policy to domestic audiences, irrespective of whether its survival is framed in ideological tones or around the deterrent ability of nuclear weapons. This question is especially pertinent in respect of North Korea, where the regime's nuclear ambitions represent one of many pressing concerns for the international community vis-à-vis the DPRK, not least its egregious human rights violations. NI raises two pertinent questions for future research. The first is whether rogue states break nuclear non-proliferation regulations to protest against inequality in the international system, and whether this norm violation can bolster domestic legitimacy and attract support from other rogue states. The second is whether regime-states capitalize on the stigma that arises from nuclear development, using it as a demonstration of agency to strengthen domestic legitimacy and gain support from other ‘rogue’ states. In analysing how states deal with stigmatization in international society, Rebecca Adler-Nissen considers practices of stigma rejection as part and parcel of stigma management for marginalized, ‘out-group’ countries.94 This idea warrants further analysis with respect to North Korea. The concept of nuclear ideology also has crucial policy implications at a time when North Korea is increasingly at the vanguard of international relations. A first question is whether the growing (illegal) domestic access to foreign media by the North Korean population—alongside diminishing domestic belief in juche— is rendering the regime-state's survival increasingly precarious. Ebbing domestic support for the regime-state may seem incongruent with popular support for its nuclear programme. This link should be examined further. As with all analyses of North Korea, however, the biggest caveat lies in the lack of direct information from the regime-state, and the reliability of such information as does emerge from state organs.95 Second, the three inter-Korean summits in 2018, and US–North Korea summits in 2018 and 2019, suggest that North Korea has pledged to work for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, but only in particular conditions, namely relief from sanctions. Whether such pledges are mere rhetorical bluster or represent a sincere desire to reduce—or abandon—its nuclear programme and ambitions, has been a matter for widespread speculation by policy-makers. Either way, such rhetoric will have a vital impact on NI, raising the question of how the North Korean regime-state will communicate any future concessions on its nuclear programme to its population, given the entrenchment of the nuclear doctrine within juche. The incumbent US administration is pursuing a conflicted policy of simultaneous engagement and containment towards North Korea, with President Trump combining summitry and negotiations with the dogged pursuit of CVID. Although the most recent Trump–Kim summit, at Hanoi in February 2019, ended inconclusively, the two US–North Korea summits so far have shown that Pyongyang is able and willing to come to the negotiating table. Nevertheless, the lack of willingness of either side to compromise on its firm stance has led to a stagnation in dialogue, at the time of writing.96 The Trump administration's narrow focus on denuclearization at a purely systemic level may hinder progress towards any conclusive agreement—permanent or temporary—with North Korea regarding its nuclear programme. Viewing North Korea solely from the blinkered perspective of the international system will lead only to poor policy-making. The Trump administration, and the wider international community, should consider how deeply embedded North Korea's nuclear programme remains within domestic narratives and ideology, and how its nuclear ideology has been invoked in the past—not least in the early Kim Il-sung era—to sustain the regime-state in its existing form. Through the lens of nuclear ideology, a greater understanding of the domestic purposes of North Korea's nuclear programme can be achieved, offering new insight into the value of nuclear weapons for the North Korean regime-state. Footnotes 1 Bruce Cumings, ‘Getting North Korea wrong’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 71: 4, 2015, pp. 64–76; Xiangfeng Yang, ‘China's clear and present conundrum on the Korean peninsula: stuck between the past and the future’, International Affairs 94: 3, May 2018, pp. 595–612; Tabish Shah, ‘North Korea in focus: reconfiguring the defence paradigm’, International Affairs 94: 5, Sept. 2018, pp. 1159–66. 2 I adopt the term ‘regime-state’ to describe North Korea because the coupled nature of the regime and state in this case means that the survival of the state in its present form refers, concurrently, to that of the regime. This close interaction between ‘regime’ and ‘state’ is particularly germane in the present context, given the prominence of the regime in cultivating domestic support and directing foreign policy, specifically nuclear development. The coupling of regime and state is prevalent in many authoritarian regimes, including the Chinese. See Andrew Nathan, ‘Authoritarian resilience’, Journal of Democracy 14: 1, 2003, pp. 6–17. 3 Hazel Smith laments portrayals of North Korea as ‘bad’ or ‘mad’, as seen in securitization-based approaches to North Korea; however, her laments reflect an outdated understanding of North Korea that is no longer prominent in contemporary policy debates. See Hazel Smith, ‘Bad, mad, sad or rational actor? Why the “securitization” paradigm makes for poor policy analysis of North Korea’, International Affairs 76: 3, May 2000, pp. 593–617. 4 On 31 March 2005, the North Korean foreign ministry declared that North Korea had become a ‘full-fledged nuclear state’: see Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), ‘North Korea foreign ministry spokesman on denuclearization of Korea’, 31 March 2005. Moreover, in 2012 a clause stating that North Korea is a ‘nuclear-armed state’ was added to the North Korean constitution: see ‘Preamble’ to the North Korean constitution, Naenara News, updated 14 June 2012. For an excellent debate regarding strategies of engagement and containment vis-à-vis North Korea, see Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang, Nuclear North Korea: a debate on engagement strategies, rev. and updated (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). 5 Daniel R. Coats, Director of National Intelligence, Worldwide threat assessment of the US intelligence community, statement for the record for the Senate Armed Services Committee (Washington DC, 23 May 2017), https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/SASC%202017%20ATA%20SFR%20-%20FINAL.PDF. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 30 Oct. 2019.) 6 Daniel R. Coats, Director of National Intelligence, Worldwide threat assessment of the US intelligence community, statement for the record for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Washington DC, 29 Jan. 2019), https://www.odni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/2019-ATA-SFR---SSCI.pdf. 7 The concept of juche is outlined in a subsequent section of this article. 8 For insight into North Korea's domestic sphere, see Kongdan Oh and Ralph C. Hassig, North Korea through the looking glass (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000); Ken E. Gause, North Korean house of cards: leadership dynamics under Kim Jong-Un (Washington DC: Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2015). For analysis on the human rights of the North Korean population, see Sandra Fahy, Marching through suffering: loss and survival in North Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Sandra Fahy, Dying for rights: putting North Korea's human rights abuses on the record (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 9 E.g. White House, ‘Readout of President Donald J. Trump's call with President Moon Jae-in of the Republic of Korea’ (Washington DC, 28 April 2018). 10 Scott D. Sagan, ‘Why do states build nuclear weapons? Three models in search of a bomb’, International Security 21: 3, 1996, pp. 54–86. 11 Sagan, ‘Why do states build nuclear weapons?’, p. 57. 12 See e.g. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 69; Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear weapons and foreign policy (New York: Harper, 1957); Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘The spread of nuclear weapons: more may be better’, Adelphi Papers 21: 171, 1981, pp. 1–32. 13 Christopher Achen and Duncan Snidal, ‘Rational deterrence theory and comparative case studies’, World Politics 41: 2, 1989, pp. 143–69; Scott D. Sagan, ‘The perils of proliferation: organization theory, deterrence theory, and the spread of nuclear weapons’, International Security 18: 4, 1994, pp. 66–107. 14 ‘Kim Jong-un's new year address’, Rodong Sinmun, 2 Jan. 2018. 15 Jacques E. C. Hymans, ‘Theories of nuclear proliferation’, Nonproliferation Review 13: 3, 2006, pp. 455–65, and The psychology of nuclear proliferation: identity, emotions, and foreign policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 16 See e.g. Willis Stanley, The strategic culture of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Washington DC: United States Defense Threat Reduction Agency), 31 Oct. 2006, https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dtra/iran.pdf. 17 Maurice Meisner, Mao's China and after: a history of the People's Republic (New York: Free Press, 1999). 18 Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of domination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 19 Martin K. Dimitrov, ‘Understanding communist collapse and resilience’, in Martin K. Dimitrov, ed., Why communism did not collapse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 3–40; Alexander Dukalskis and Johannes Gerschewski, ‘What autocracies say (and what citizens hear): proposing four mechanisms of autocratic legitimation’, Contemporary Politics 23: 3, 2017, pp. 251–68. 20 Vaclav Havel, ‘The power of the powerless’, in Vaclav Havel, Steven Lukes and John Keane, eds, The power of the powerless: citizens against the state in central–eastern Europe (London: Hutchinson, 1985), pp. 10–60; Timur Kuran, Private truths, public lies: the social consequences of preference falsification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 21 Jonathan Leader Maynard, ‘Rethinking the role of ideology in mass atrocities’, Terrorism and Political Violence 26: 5, 2014, p. 824. 22 Johannes Gerschewski, ‘The three pillars of stability: legitimation, repression, and co-optation in autocratic regimes’, Democratization 20: 1, 2013, pp. 13–38; Mirjam Edel and Maria Josua, ‘How authoritarian rulers seek to legitimize repression: framing mass killings in Egypt and Uzbekistan’, Democratization 25: 5, 2018, pp. 882–900. 23 KCNA, ‘Kim Jong Un makes new year address’, 1 Jan. 2018. 24 KCNA, ‘DPRK delegate rejects “draft resolution”, A/C.3/71/L.23’, 17 Nov. 2016. 25 The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty distinguishes between ‘legal’ and ‘non-legal’ nuclear weapon states: a legal nuclear weapon state must have ‘manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device prior to 1 January 1967’ (Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Art. IX, IAEA INFCIRC/140, 22 April 1970). 26 The crafting of juche is widely attributed to Hwang Jang-yop, chairman of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People's Assembly from 1972 to 1983. See Robert J. Myers, Korea in the cross currents: a century of struggle and the crisis of reunification (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 27 Channing Liem, The Korean War: an unanswered question (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1993); Kathryn Weathesby, Should we fear this? Stalin and the danger of war with America, Cold War International History Project working paper no. 39 (Washington DC: Wilson Center, 2002), pp. 1–27. 28 ‘US should not forget disgraceful defeat in war’, Rodong Sinmun, 26 July 2014. 29 Roger Dingman, ‘Atomic diplomacy during the Korean War’, International Security 13: 3, 1989, pp. 50–91; Rosemary Foot, ‘Nuclear coercion and the ending of the Korean conflict’, International Security 13: 3, 1989, pp. 92–112. 30 Brian Myers, ‘Ideology as smokescreen: North Korea's juche thought’, Acta Koreana 11: 3, 2008, pp. 161–82. 31 This was one of the first responses received from North Korean defectors when asked about juche. 32 Alexandre Y. Mansourov, ‘The origins, evolution, and current politics of the North Korean nuclear program’, Nonproliferation Review 2: 3, 1995, p. 26. 33 ‘Conversation between Soviet Ambassador in North Korea Vasily Moskovsky and Soviet specialists in North Korea’, 27 Sept. 1963, obtained and trans. for North Korea International Documentation Project (NKIDP) by Sergey Radchenko (Washington DC: Wilson Center, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive). 34 ‘Conversation between Soviet Ambassador in North Korea Vasily Moskovsky and North Korean foreign minister Pak Seongecheol’, 24 Aug. 1962, obtained and trans. for NKIDP by Sergey Radchenko (Washington DC: Wilson Center, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive). 35 ‘Cable from the Chinese Embassy in North Korea, “Reactions among the North Korean masses to China's nuclear test”’, PRC FMA 113-00395-08, 62-63, 21 Oct. 1964, trans. Caixia Lu (Washington DC: Wilson Center History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive). 36 ‘Cable from the Chinese Embassy in North Korea, “Reactions to China's nuclear test”’, PRC FMA 113-00395-08, 58-59, 17 Oct. 1964, trans. Caixia Lu (Washington DC: Wilson Center History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive). 37 Walter Clemens, ‘North Korea's quest for nuclear weapons: new historical evidence’, Journal of East Asian Studies 10: 1, 2010, p. 131. This reactor was placed under IAEA safeguards in 1977: see Agreement between the International Atomic Energy Agency and the government of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea for the application of safeguards to the Research Reactor Facility (IRT)—Pyongyang, 20 July 1977, INFCIRC/252 (Vienna: IAEA Archives, 14 Nov. 1977). 38 e.g. ‘Telegram, Embassy of Hungary in the Soviet Union to the Hungarian foreign ministry’, 18 May 1977, obtained and trans. for NKIDP by Balazs Szalontai (Washington DC: Wilson Center History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive). 39 Kim Keun-sik distinguishes between ‘pure’ ideologies, which aim to affect individual thought, and ‘practical’ ideologies, which target on-the-ground implementation. See Kim Keun-sik, ‘Gimjeong-ilsi daebgudhan-ui sinbaljeongjeonglyag’ [North Korea's new development strategy in the Kim Jong-il era], International Politics 43: 4, 2003, pp. 197–218. 40 Mansourov, ‘The origins, evolution, and current politics’, p. 29. 41 Jae-Jung Suh, Origins of North Korea's juche: colonialism, war, and development (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), p. 107. 42 ‘“Imminent, real” war danger cited, reunification termed “urgent”’, Pyongyang Domestic Service, 10 Jan. 1977, in Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) APA-77-009, pp. D3–D8. 43 Jina Kim, ‘Sources and objectives of North Korea foreign policy: identity, values, and negotiating behavior’, in Utpal Vyas, Ching-Chang Chen and Denny Roy, eds, The North Korea crisis and regional responses (Honolulu: East–West Center, 2015), pp. 14–15. 44 Chang-ha Kim, The immortal juche idea (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1984). 45 CIA National Foreign Assessment Center, North Korean strategy and tactics: an appraisal, RP 78-10127 (Langley, VA, April 1978), p. 4. 46 CIA, East Asia Brief, 27 Dec. 1985; ‘Diplomatic source on North Korea–USSR nuclear power agreement’, Chungang Ilbo, 27 Dec. 1985, p. 3. On 26 Dec. 1985, an agreement was reached between North Korea and the USSR, whereby the USSR would ‘construct four pressurized water reactors’ for North Korea. Construction of these reactors was never completed (see Mansourov, ‘The origins, evolution, and current politics’, p. 37). 47 CIA, ‘Nuclear reactor under construction in North Korea’, memorandum from Deputy Director for Intelligence coordinator (Langley, VA, 19 April 1984). 48 North Korea has decried South Korea as an illegitimate ‘puppet state’ of the United States: see Young Kim, ‘North Korean foreign policy’, Problems of Communism, vol. 34, 1985, p. 14. 49 Virginie Grzelczyk, ‘In the name of the father, son, and grandson: succession patterns and the Kim dynasty’, Journal of Northeast Asian History 9: 2, 2012, pp. 33–68. 50 US Embassy, Seoul, ‘Seoul—press bulletin’, 15 June 2009, WikiLeaks cable 09SEOUL941_a. 51 US Embassy, Beijing, ‘2009 US–China defense consultative talks: Asia Pacific security and North Korea’, 1 July 2009, WikiLeaks cable 09BEIJING1823_a. 52 Brian Myers has expressed scepticism about the importance of juche in North Korean society: see B. R. Myers, The cleanest race: how North Koreans see themselves—and why it matters (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2012); B. R. Myers, North Korea's juche myth (Busan: Sthele, 2015). 53 For example, state media praised the second test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on 28 July 2017 as demonstrating ‘the independent prestige and dignity of juche nuclear power’: North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Kim Jong-un guides second test-fire of ICBM Hwasong-14’ (Pyongyang, 29 July 2017). 54 Kim Il-sung, For the independent, peaceful reunification of the country (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1973), p. 192; see also KCNA, ‘Kim Il-song speech’, 10 Dec. 1958, in FBIS-FRB-58-240, 11 Dec. 1958, p. JJJ6. 55 ‘US attempt to maintain hegemonic position’, Pyongyang Times, 19 Feb. 2018. 56 H. D. Ri, ‘North Korea's strategic decision is just’, Rodong Sinmun, 8 Jan. 2018. 57 Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000); Jason Brownlee, ‘Hereditary succession in modern autocracies’, World Politics 59: 4, 2007, pp. 595–628. 58 KCNA, ‘Gimjeongil chongbiseo lossiya ittaleuttasseutongsinsaga jegihan jilmun-e jusin daedab’ [General Secretary Kim Jong-il answers questions from ITAR-Tass of Russia], 19 Oct. 2011. 59 Kim, For the independent, peaceful reunification, p. 192. North Korea wants a unified peninsula controlled by the North: see ‘Kim Il-sung delivers new year address’, Korean Central Broadcasting Network, 1 Jan. 1993, in FBIS-EAS-93-001, 4 Jan. 1993, p. 13; Wan-kyu Choi, ‘North Korea's new unification strategy’, Asian Perspective 25: 2, 2001, pp. 99–122. 60 On 10 March 1993, after the resumption of ‘Team Spirit’, Kim Jong-il called on the North Korean people and army to ‘enter into a semi state of war’, and ‘annihilate the enemy at a blow if it assaults them’. Invocations of war have continued under Kim Jong-un. For example, in September 2017, Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho dismissed President Trump's claim that the North Korean leadership ‘won't be around much longer’ as ‘a declaration of war’. See ‘Kim Chong-il orders army mobilization’, Korean Central Broadcasting Network, 8 March 1993, in FBIS-EAS-93-043, 8 March 1993, pp. 9–11; ‘North Korea accuses US of declaring war, says can take countermeasures’, Reuters, 25 Sept. 2017. 61 Author's interview with defector G, 23 Oct. 2017, Oxford. 62 ‘Policy accent focused more on ideological, military programs rather than economic projects in Kansong Taeguk campaign’, Vantage Point, Jan. 1999. 63 KCNA, ‘Dependence on foreign forces will lead to ruin: Rodong Sinmun’, 22 Oct. 2013. 64 Yun Kyong Il, ‘North Korea's foremost national strength’, Pyongyang Times, 20 Feb. 2018; KCNA, ‘Rodong Sinmun ridicules malarkey by US riff-raff’, 25 Dec. 2017. In 2013, Kim Jong-un described the ‘juche-based application satellite’ launch, in 2012, as ‘demonstrat[ing] the dignity and might of Songun Korea’; KCNA, ‘New Year address made by Kim Jong-un’, 1 Jan. 2013. 65 Author's interview with defector B, 8 July 2017, Seoul. 66 Author's interview with defector L, 23 Oct. 2017, Oxford. 67 Author's interview with defector G, 23 Oct. 2017, Oxford. 68 KCNA, ‘North Korea successfully conducts underground nuclear test’, 9 Oct. 2006. 69 US Embassy, Seoul, ‘The North Korea leadership succession: ROK observers divided on who will succeed Kim Jong-il’, 23 Feb. 2006, WikiLeaks cable 06SEOUL595_a. 70 Author's interviews with defectors D, E, G, I, K throughout 2017, in Seoul, London and Oxford. 71 In 1992, Kim Il-sung described this ‘paradise’ as when ‘all people may equally eat rice and meat soup regularly, wear silk clothes, and live in a house with a tiled roof’. This was first mentioned during the Third Supreme People's Assembly in 1962. See ‘Kim Il-sung delivers new year address’, Korean Central Broadcasting Network, 1 Jan. 1992, in FBIS-EAS-92-001, p. 15; Kim Il Sung, Selected works of Kim Il Sung, vol. 3 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1971), p. 395. 72 ‘Let us go all out for a general onward march to build a kangsong taeguk’, Rodong Sinmun, 5 Jan. 1999; ‘Orhaereul gangseongdaeguk geonseorui widaehan jeonhwanui haero binnaejia’ [This year marks the year of the great transition of the construction of a strong nation], Rodong Sinmun, 1 Jan. 1999. 73 On 20 April 2018, Kim Jong-un announced the ‘new strategic line’, whereby, North Korea being deemed to have completed the nuclear programme in 2017, exclusive focus would be placed on domestic economic development. 74 Robert Jervis, ‘Do leaders matter and how would we know?’, Security Studies 22: 2, 2013, p. 155. 75 Daniel Byman and Jennifer Lind, ‘Pyongyang's survival strategy: tools of authoritarian control in North Korea’, International Security 35: 1, 2010, p. 52. 76 Author's interview with elite defector A, 10 July 2017, Seoul. 77 ‘Telegram, Embassy of Hungary in the Soviet Union to the Hungarian foreign ministry’, 20 Jan. 1977, and ‘Report, Embassy of Hungary in North Korea to the Hungarian foreign ministry’, 9 March 1985, both obtained and trans. for the Cold War International History Project by Balazs Szalontai (Washington DC: Wilson Center). 78 Author's interview with South Korean diplomat, 5 July 2017, Seoul. 79 See e.g. Nat Kretchun and Jane Kim, ‘A quiet opening: North Koreans in a changing media environment’, InterMedia, May 2012, pp. 1–94; Jieun Baek, North Korea's hidden revolution: how the information underground is transforming a closed society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 80 Author's interview with defector E, 14 July 2017, Seoul. 81 Author's interview with defector H, 20 Dec. 2017, London. 82 Email from Marko Papic to Stratfor, ‘Budget—North Korea: Pyongyang post Kim Jong-Il’, 9 Sept. 2008, WikiLeaks cable, Email-ID 1814348. 83 KCNA, ‘Army, mainstay of revolution’, 9 March 1998. 84 Author's interview with South Korean governmental adviser, 27 Feb. 2018, London. 85 US Embassy, Shanghai, ‘Shanghai scholars on North Korea’, 13 Oct. 2006, WikiLeaks cable 06SHANGHAI6518_a. Another explanation for military loyalty to the state leadership is that military officials fear losing the economic privileges conferred by their status, should they oppose state directives, as noted by elite defector A (author's interview, 10 July 2017, Seoul). 86 Author's interview with elite defector C, 28 Sept. 2017, Oxford. 87 Author's interview with defector B, 8 July 2017, Seoul. 88 Kuran, Private truths, public lies…‚ pp. 16–17. 89 Young Whan Kihl and Hong Nack Kim, eds, North Korea: the politics of regime survival (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), p. 13. 90 The Sino-North Korean relationship has not always been smooth, particularly under Kim Jong-un. In recent years, China has supported UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea's nuclear development, in line with which China suspended coal imports from North Korea in February 2017. In May 2017, North Korea stated that it would ‘never beg for the maintenance of friendship with China’, and decried China's support for sanctions as an act of ‘big-power chauvinism’. See Choe Sang-hun, ‘China suspends all coal imports from North Korea’, New York Times, 18 Feb. 2017; KCNA, ‘Neighbouring country's mean behaviour’, 24 Feb. 2017; KCNA, ‘Commentary on North Korea–China relations’, 3 May 2017. 91 Gregory J. Moore, ‘How North Korea threatens China's interests: understanding Chinese “duplicity” on the North Korean nuclear issue’, International Relations of the Asia–Pacific 8: 1, 2007, pp. 1–29. 92 Kim Jong-un has, so far, had four summits with Xi Jinping, in 2018 and 2019. The first Sino-North Korean summit took place after the US–North Korea summit in Singapore. Subsequent meetings have taken place during periods of stalled dialogue between the US, South Korea and North Korea. 93 Samuel S. Kim, ‘North Korea's nuclear strategy and the interface between international and domestic politics’, Asian Perspective 34: 1, 2010, p. 53. 94 Rebecca Adler-Nissen, ‘Stigma management in International Relations: transgressive identities, norms, and order in international society’, International Organization 68: 1, 2014, pp. 143–76. 95 Victor Cha stresses that ‘North Korea is the blackest of black boxes and no such reliable information is available’: Victor D. Cha, ‘The rationale for “enhanced” engagement of North Korea: after the Perry policy review’, Asian Survey 39: 6, 1999, p. 847. 96 Having met Kim Jong-un at the demilitarized zone on 30 June 2019, President Trump announced that the two sides had agreed to pursue working-level talks. On 1 Oct. 2019, North Korea announced that working-level talks would commence on 5 Oct. See KCNA, ‘Choe son hui, first vice-minister of foreign affairs of North Korea, issues statement’, 1 Oct. 2019; Peter Baker and Michael Crowley, ‘Trump steps into North Korea and agrees with Kim Jong-un to resume talks’, New York Times, 30 June 2019. Author notes The author would like to thank those international diplomats and former North Korean citizens who agreed to share their insight and expertise for this study. Particular thanks must go to the North Korean interviewees, for telling vivid stories, recounting past—and often traumatic—events, and shining light on life in the DPRK. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. 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TI - The juche H-bomb? North Korea, nuclear weapons and regime-state survival
JF - International Affairs
DO - 10.1093/ia/iiz253
DA - 2020-07-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-juche-h-bomb-north-korea-nuclear-weapons-and-regime-state-survival-DlUebG1MiM
DP - DeepDyve
ER -