In the last two years I have visited North Korea twice at the invitation of the Korean Workers' Party and twice as a consultant to the United Nations on environmental concerns in the North. My visit in October was the fourth time that I had an opportunity to discuss nuclear issues with North Korean leaders. From inside Pyongyang, however, it is easier to understand North Korean aims.
Survival is the paramount concern.
After 40 years of a forced march toward autarchic socialist industrialization, North Korea is on a downward economic spiral. Isolated, bankrupt, and surrounded by hostile or suspicious neighbors, North Korea's militarized command economy is incapable of overcoming its problems-technological obsolescence, bottlenecks, and an aging and apathetic work force that lacks the skills needed in a modern economy. The regime exercises total control over information. Most North Koreans are unaware of their relative deprivation and their missed opportunities. The regime has a sophisticated apparatus of ideological mobilization of unparalleled intensity, sustained by a mythic version of Kim Il Sung's role in Korean history, frequently buttressed by the invocation of threats from abroad.