Letter From North Korea: What Life Looks Like as Nuclear Crisis Mounts A tightly controlled government tour of Pyongyang featured sculptures of atoms, children playing with toy rocket launchers and plentiful talk about not backing down By John Lyons and Jonathan Cheng
https://www.wsj.com/articles/letter-from-north-korea-what-life-looks-like-as-nuclear-crisis-mounts-1506097544?mod=trending_now_5
PYONGYANG, North Korea—North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are etched into the landscape of its showcase capital city.
A giant sculpture of the atom sits on top of a new apartment tower built for nuclear scientists. Atom designs adorn road overpasses, lampposts and building facades.
Bomb imagery colors daily life. At an orphanage, children play with plastic mobile rocket launchers instead of toy trucks. Shops sell commemorative intercontinental ballistic missile stamps, while a bakery sells cakes featuring an upright rocket, ready for launch.
During a recent visit, the first by The Wall Street Journal since 2008, the city’s atomic aesthetics reinforced the message government officials conveyed repeatedly to the Journal reporters: North Korea won’t part with its nuclear weapons under any circumstances and is resolved to suffer economic sanctions and risk war with the U.S. to keep them.
“It is too late, we have grown up,” said Ri Yong Pil, the vice president of the Institute for American Studies, a division of North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “We are not interested in dialogue to undermine our newly built strategic status.”
The Journal reporters traveled to Pyongyang for a tightly controlled reporting trip between Sept. 14 and 19 amid rising tension between the U.S. and North Korea, one of the world’s most brutal and isolated dictatorships. North Korea launched a ballistic missile over Japan on the second day of the trip. Hours after the group departed, U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to “totally destroy North Korea” if the U.S. is required to defend itself or allies, saying leader Kim Jong Un —whom he called “Rocket Man”—was on a suicide path.
On the day the Journal group flew into Pyongyang, North Korea’s state news agency declared in a news release that all “Yankees” should be “beaten to death, as a stick is fit for a rabid dog,” for persuading the United Nations to enact economic sanctions against the country.
Two affable, English-speaking diplomats in dark suits who received the Journal at Pyongyang’s new glass-fronted international airport took a more measured tone.
Over the next few days, the supervised series of official interviews, visits to city landmarks and brief encounters with a handful of Pyongyang residents appeared to signal a rare outreach campaign by the government, which has included other U.S. news organizations, to describe what it sees as the logic of its nuclear-weapons program. The U.S. and North Korea don’t have diplomatic relations, and even informal contact between the two nations is limited.
Official reporting trips to North Korea only happen with the explicit sanction of the state, and visitors are kept under close watch. Authorities granted Journal requests to visit factories and stores, which were chosen by the government. Some requests, such as to meet two U.S. citizens detained while working at a Pyongyang university, were denied.
Handlers allowed the Journal to talk to residents encountered along the way, but translations were done by the North Koreans and it was unclear if people felt free to speak their minds. CONTINUE AT SITE
Comments are closed.
