Outside the concerts, Thae arranged for his VIP visitor to enjoy the best of London.
“I took him to a fancy restaurant in the Shard, but he didn’t eat much,” Thae told me some years later, referring to the landmark London tower. “So I asked him what he wanted to eat, and he said McDonalds. So we went to McDonalds, and he ate. He particularly loved the French fries.”
But even at the concerts or eating fries, Kim Jong Chol didn’t seem happy for long, Thae said. “He seldom smiled. He was so silent.”
Kim Jong Un seemed to have his full brother where he wanted him, close enough to keep an eye on him and see that he harbored no illusions about who was the rightful heir to their father’s throne. Kim Jong Chol didn’t sneak around and embarrass his younger brother, and he certainly didn’t offer any criticisms to journalists.
Except for those Eric Clapton concerts, he was never seen publicly. He didn’t appear next to his brother at military parades, at on-the-spot guidance sessions, or during the nuclear tests and missile launches that were about to become increasingly frequent.
CHAPTER 14
THE TREASURED SWORD
“We will continue to build up our self-defense capability, the pivot of which is the nuclear forces, and the capability for preemptive strike as long as the United States and its vassal forces keep on nuclear threat and blackmail.”
—Kim Jong Un, January 1, 2017
THE GREAT SUCCESSOR WAS HAPPY—VERY HAPPY. HANDS-ON-hips, open-mouthed-smile, applauding-himself happy.
In September 2017, nearly six years into Kim Jong Un’s reign, North Korea was proclaiming it had just dealt “a merciless sledge-hammer blow to the U.S. imperialists and their vassal forces.”
The country’s scientists had built a hydrogen bomb, and they had just detonated it underneath Mount Manthap in the north of the country. The explosion was so huge that earth-observation satellites showed the 7,200-foot peak visibly subsiding immediately after the blast.1
With that test, North Korea had become the newest—and very unwelcome—member of the H-bomb club, a club that until that day had officially included only the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France.
We are now armed with a “powerful treasured sword for defending peace,” Kim told the North Korean power players while declaring that no more nuclear tests would be needed.2 It was his signal that North Korea had achieved the technological capacity that it wanted. It didn’t need to do any more tests because it had perfected “the bomb.”
Kim Jong Un was already head of an army of 1.2 million soldiers, making it the fourth largest in the world. Now, at thirty-three, he was the world’s youngest nuclear-armed leader too. He wanted to make it clear that this was his program. He was pictured at missile launches and engine tests, inspecting the peanut-shaped hydrogen bomb and signing the order to detonate it.
Kim had pledged to develop the economy and the nuclear program in parallel, but in reality it was more of a staged process. Although he had taken the shackles off the economy and allowed the markets to flourish, the economic growth experienced during those early years was more a result of benign neglect, of inattention, than anything else.
For Kim’s attention was on the nuclear program. To bolster his claim to lead North Korea—and to make the outside world think twice about challenging him—Kim Jong Un poured all his state’s resources into the nuclear and missile programs.
For a while, the world sniggered at North Korea’s self-proclaimed military prowess. The “genius strategist” Kim Jong Un was lampooned for looking through upside-down binoculars shortly before he became leader and afterward for riding through the water in a clearly rusted submarine while supposedly commanding the navy. When Kim Jong Un appeared with what North Korea said was a miniaturized nuclear weapon, it was mocked as looking like a disco ball. The internet exploded with memes.
But the Great Successor wanted to prove he was no joke. As he settled into his new role, he wanted to show clear progress. He needed to make good on his constant refrain that North Korea was a “strong and prosperous country” and quickly homed in on the nuclear weapons program as a way to do it.
The first advancement was a paper one. In the middle of 2012, Kim Jong Un revised the country’s constitution to elevate his father and celebrate his nuclear achievements in black and white. For the first time, the word “nuclear” was put into the constitution. Kim Jong Il had turned North Korea “into an invincible political ideological state, nuclear-armed state and undefeatable militarily strong state,” the revised document said.3
With his first nuclear test in February 2013 and his early missile launches, it looked like Kim Jong Un was making the same unsubstantiated boasts that his father had made, talking up his state’s technical abilities and using the program for political purposes.
The North Korean regime likes to time its provocations for maximum impact, and in the month around that February nuclear test were three events that he could mark with an ostentatious display of North Korean bravado: Barack Obama had started his second term as president of the United States just a few weeks earlier, and the conservative Park Geun-hye would be sworn in as president of South Korea a few weeks later. In between was the anniversary of his father’s birthday, a day celebrated in North Korea as the Day of the Shining Star.
From a technical standpoint, Kim’s first nuclear test wasn’t much of an advance from the previous ones. The timing seemed designed to show that the young dictator had found his feet. The missiles launched in 2013 and 2014 were not particularly impressive either, a rat-a-tat of short-range missiles that North Korea was already known to possess.
All that started to change in the middle of 2016. In January of that year, Kim Jong Un’s propagandists claimed they had tested a hydrogen bomb. The explosion did not have the yield of a hydrogen bomb. Then, within days, they released footage of what they said was a ballistic missile being launched from a submarine, something that could be a significant advance if true.
It turned out the video had been digitally manipulated so that North Korea could grossly exaggerate its abilities again and seem like it had made more progress than it actually had. More laughter ensued around the world at the tin-pot regime that couldn’t even master Photoshop. How could they be taken seriously as a threat?
But this was another case of North Korea signaling its intentions. Kim Jong Un didn’t have an H-bomb, nor could he fire ballistic missiles from under the water, but he wanted to be able to. And soon he would.
To mark Kim Il Sung’s birthday in 2016, North Korea fired a Musudan, an intermediate-range ballistic missile technically capable of reaching all of Japan and South Korea and even the American territory of Guam in the middle of the Pacific. The launch was a failure. A week later, another submarine-launched ballistic missile resulted in another failure. At the end of May, another Musudan failed.
But in June, two more tests showed the North Koreans were learning from their mistakes. One test was successful, the other not. While the outside world scoffed, North Korea was making progress, and it was all due to “the Ever-Victorious, Iron-Willed Commander.”
“We have the sure capability to attack in an overall and practical way the Americans in the Pacific operation theater,” said an elated Kim Jong Un, who’d supervised the successful launch. He was pictured sitting at a table, holding binoculars and with a map in front of him, while all around him were ecstatic military men cheering and throwing their hands in the air.
The missiles were being fired from mobile launchers, converted trucks that could be wheeled out from any hangar or tunnel in the country. They were no longer coming off fixed test stands that were easy for satellites to monitor. This ought to have alerted the rest of the world that North Korea had upped the ante.
By August, the laughter that had followed the failed submarine launches had faded. A ballistic missile unleashed from a submarine off North Korea’s east coast flew right into Japanese-controlled waters. From then on, the failures be
came fewer, and the successes became more frequent. The missiles flew farther. It wasn’t just the progress that was alarming; it was the sheer number of launches. It showed that North Korea had missiles to burn.
In 2017, two nuclear tests took place, including one that really was a hydrogen bomb. For good measure, they also launched three intercontinental ballistic missiles, the first on America’s birthday, July 4, for maximum effect. That one could theoretically reach Alaska. Kim Jong Un’s regime called it “a gift to the American bastards.”
Next time it was launched, at the end of the month, the missile showed it could reach Denver or Chicago. By the end of November, Kim Jong Un had supervised another launch, but this time the missile’s range demonstrated that it could technically reach anywhere in the United States, including Washington, DC.
He hadn’t yet proven the regime’s ability to combine the two components: delivering a nuclear-tipped warhead to a target is a very difficult feat, one that requires the nuclear device to withstand severe vibration and huge extremes in temperature. But few analysts doubted that Kim Jong Un would soon, with time and more testing, be able to achieve that.
For Kim, developing a credible nuclear weapons system was a way to fend off the United States while he consolidated his grip on the regime. Indeed, despite the highly provocative nature of the nuclear tests and missile launches, the leader emphasized that he would only use his nuclear arsenal in defense. We “will not use nuclear weapons first unless aggressive hostile forces use nuclear weapons to invade on our sovereignty,” he said at that first-in-a-generation congress in 2016.
Kim saw his nuclear program as an insurance policy against the kind of fate that had befallen Muammar Gaddafi. Using it preemptively would be suicidal, guaranteeing an American response that would be impossible for the Kim family to survive. But having a few nuclear-tipped missiles that can reach Washington could help deter the United States from attacking North Korea. Nothing says “take me seriously” to the outside world like an H-bomb and the potential to deliver it.
The tests and launches also carried an important domestic message. To the people of North Korea, Kim Jong Un was saying, “Look what a strong and advanced state we’re becoming under my great leadership.”
Channeling precious resources into the nuclear program was a way to placate the military—the institution that might be the least impressed with the unqualified “marshal.” In a country that has so little else to celebrate, the nuclear program is a great source of pride, even among those who bucked the system.
“I remember one day when we were taught about nuclear technology,” Man-bok, the science student who escaped, told me when I asked him about his course work. “I remember being really impressed that my country had been able to make these advances and become a nuclear power.”
Nuclear weapons and missiles have been built into lessons at school, with little children taught to have pride in the programs and older ones taught about the physics involved. An elementary school “socialist ethics” textbook published in 2013 shows a man, a boy, and a picture of an Unha-3 rocket. “Is it true that you gave joy to the Respected Leader?” the child is asking his father, who appears to be an engineer.
Kim Jong Un has lavished praise and luxuries on scientists of all stripes since he became the state’s leader.
“Boundless is Kim Jong Un’s loving care for the scientists and technicians, who have played a big role in improving the people’s livelihood and beefing up the defense capabilities,” state media reported when the Great Successor visited Kim Chaek University of Technology—the MIT of North Korea—in 2013. One of the most surprising images of Kim Jong Un’s tenure that did not involve Dennis Rodman came after the ground test for a new rocket engine in March 2017.
The Respected Marshal, in a brown overcoat and with a broad smile, gave a piggyback ride to one of the key men involved in the project. The clearly anguished rocket scientist, who is decades his senior, bounced around on Kim’s back as other officers, all decked out in olive-green military uniforms, laughed and cheered.
The act recalled a Korean tradition of symbolic piggybacking. Young men carry their parents on their backs to show how grateful they are. And in Korean wedding ceremonies, the groom hoists his bride on his back to show his strength and that he intends to carry her, if not exactly literally, for the rest of their lives.
So Kim’s message was clear: he was showing his unprecedented gratitude and his love for these rocket experts.
When North Korea’s state media issued photos of the young emperor inspecting a nuclear device one Sunday morning near the end of his sixth year in power, the reaction from the outside world was to chuckle.
The photographs showed Kim craning over a device with a silver metal casing, a small bulge at one end and a larger bulge at the other. It was immediately nicknamed “the peanut.” The internet laughed at the funny dictator looking at the funny bit of kit the size of a large barbecue.
Five nuclear scientists, all dressed in dark Mao suits identical to Kim Jong Un’s, pointed out the finer details of the device to the leader. And they all took notes in little notebooks, apparently jotting down the leader’s thoughts, although they were nuclear scientists and he was not.
In case there was any doubt about what Kim Jong Un wanted to do with this device, it was positioned behind the nose cone of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Reinforcing the message, there was a chart on the wall behind showing how the warhead would fit into the cone.
It seemed like classic North Korean hyperbole. It was not.
A few hours later, seismic sensors recorded an artificial earthquake in the north of the country with a magnitude of 6.3. It was a thermonuclear blast from a bomb exponentially more powerful than the devices they’d set off before. The waves showed that the device had a yield of as much as 250 kilotons, making it about 17 times the size of the American bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.
The scientific evidence seemed beyond question. Intelligence agencies and nuclear experts around the world generally conceded that the size of the blast was consistent with a thermonuclear test.
Kim Jong Un made sure to take full credit for this development. A television special showed him signing the authorization for the test. Everyone had to know that these achievements were all his glorious doing. This bomb was his baby. The celebrations continued for more than a week in Pyongyang.
The following weekend, the nuclear team posed for a commemorative photo in front of the Kumsusan Memorial Palace mausoleum, the kind of photo that looks like a joke because there are so many people arranged underneath pictures of the two dead leaders. It’s impossible to make anyone out except for the large man in the black Mao suit center front. But that’s the point: Kim Jong Un wants to show that a domestically produced nuclear weapon is made through the hard work of very many North Koreans, and that the effort is inextricably intertwined with the vision of the Eternal President and the Dear Leader.
Later, at a huge banquet at a palatial guesthouse in the middle of Pyongyang, cadres pledged with “revolutionary enthusiasm” to defend North Korea “with the strongest nuclear bombs in the world.” They vowed their loyalty to Kim Jong Un.
The sequence of celebrations was topped off by a concert in Pyongyang, where a jubilant Kim Jong Un walked into the theater with his wife and his two top nuclear scientists to the resounding applause of the awaiting cadres. The concert included snappy numbers such as “Glory to General Kim Jong Un” and “We Will Go Along the Road of Loyalty.” When the young leader’s picture was displayed on the huge screen, the audience broke into “enthusiastic applause with excitement,” the state media said.
“Our H-bomb with super explosive power is certainly the H-bomb of Kim Jong Un, produced by his ardent love for the country and the people,” Ri Man Gon, the director of munitions industries and one of the people most responsible for the nuclear program, said at the concert. It was Ri and the other nuclear scientists who’d done all the work, but they knew
to whom they had to give the credit.
Lights shone around the theater, glinting off the medals that covered many of the chests in the crowd. The applause and adoration were guaranteed. Everyone chosen to be in that audience knew what was required of them, but there can be no doubt that it was also partly genuine. After all, it was universally acknowledged that North Korea had achieved a spectacular feat.
Outside, there was widespread shock that a state so primitive in most of its technology and unable to provide basic sustenance and services to its people had made the bomb and that it had managed not only to master the technology but also to circumvent the decade of sanctions meant to cut off its ability to get the money or the necessary parts.
Siegfried Hecker, however, was not shocked. North Korea had been telegraphing its intentions every step of the way. The problem is that very few people were taking the regime seriously.
“They have been showing us since the 1980s that they were working on this,” he told me shortly after the detonation. Hecker is a renowned nuclear scientist who had been the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, before moving to Stanford University. But he has also had an unparalleled view of North Korea’s nuclear program. When North Korea wanted to show off its achievements, they called Hecker.
When he was invited to North Korea in 2010, while Kim Jong Un was doing his dictator’s apprenticeship, Hecker expected to see fifty-year-old technology as he had on previous visits.
Instead, he was taken into a modern uranium enrichment facility, where he saw two thousand current centrifuges all lined up neatly. Hecker was astonished. That’s when he realized it: “We are not going to get them to give up the bomb.”
The centrifuges that Hecker saw that day were housed in a building with a bright blue roof that was clearly visible from the sky.
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