In eliminating his uncle Jang Song-taek, North Korea’s young leader Kim Jong Un acted like a character out of a Shakespearian drama with Stalinist characteristics. Whether Jang’s show trial and summary execution will help to consolidate or undermine Kim’s power remains to be seen. But the statement on Jang’s indictment confirms—apparently unwittingly—the enormous economic, political, and social problems facing his regime. This stunning contradiction by North Korea itself of decades of official bravado about the unity of the leadership and people and its narrative of steady progress on all fronts may or may not have serious consequences in North Korea, but it certainly will abroad.

In attempting to transfer blame for all the country’s economic troubles to Jang, the statement reports that his alleged confession referred to “the present regime … not tak[ing] any measures despite the fact that the economy and the country and people’s living are driven into catastrophe” and that “the [standard of] living of the people and service personnel may further deteriorate [italics added] in the future.” The statement also implicitly acknowledges that the botched currency re-denomination in 2009 was responsible for “sparking off serious economic chaos and disturbing the people’s mind-set.” Jang is accused of undermining Kim’s pet project of dressing up the capital of Pyongyang through massive apartment and other construction projects for the elite there at the expense of ordinary people in the rest of the country. Without citing China by name, the statement blasts Jang for making cozy deals with that country for the sale of North Korean minerals and for Chinese investment in North Korea’s special economic zones.

The regime’s leaders may have felt that releasing this statement and punctuating it with Jang’s execution were necessary for their purposes at home, but they clearly must not have understood the consequences it will have abroad. For example, whether or not it signals that the regime itself plans to backtrack on economic deals with China, PRC leaders will be further angered by the regime’s disrespect of Chinese interests. They will be more cautious about economic engagement with Pyongyang, and they will be more amenable to increasing sanctions against North Korea when it engages in its next provocation. North Korea leaders apparently are uneasy about their extreme reliance on China for economic support and hope to diversify their economic engagement. But for the rest of the world, too, Jang’s execution and this statement will only underline for a long time to come the extremely high political risk of economic dealings with Pyongyang.

U.S. and South Korean officials will look closely at the assertion that Jang intended to “grab the supreme power of the party and state by employing all the most cunning and sinister means and methods, pursuant to the ‘strategic patience’ policy and ‘waiting strategy’ of the U.S. and the south Korean puppet group of traitors [italics added].” Already determined to maintain sanctions pressure on Pyongyang to force it to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons, U.S. and South Korean officials will take this as an acknowledgement by the North Koreans themselves of the efficacy of their policy and double down on it.

In the wake of Jang’s execution, Pyongyang, predictably, is trying to send signals to the outside world that all is well. A North Korean ambassador reiterated that North Korea is open for all kinds of talks with foreign countries to reduce tensions, and the regime has invited South Korea to talks about their joint industrial park in North Korea. Kim Jong Un may now seek to increase economic exchanges with Seoul to reduce his dependence on Beijing. South Korea is not opposed to economic engagement with North Korea, but President Park Geun-hye will insist on international standards and transparency, something that Kim Jong Un will find very hard to swallow.  

Earlier this year, Kim declared his fundamental policy to be byeongjin, that is, “parallel progress” in developing nuclear weapons and growing the economy. Jang’s execution and especially Kim’s explanation for it will make it that much harder for Kim to accomplish either goal. The North Koreans do not seem to understand that Jang’s execution alone would likely not have had a large lasting impact abroad but that issuing this kind of a statement will. It has underlined the brutal and anachronistic nature of the North Korean regime to governments and peoples throughout the world, which will now view the regime with even more skepticism for a long time to come. Moreover, Washington and Seoul must now prepare for an increased possibility that Kim will stage another sneak attack on South Korea to rally support at home.

It’s hard to find reasons for optimism at this point, but if there is any glint of a silver lining, it is that the regime itself has unintentionally revealed its desperate need to find remedies for its domestic political and economic troubles. Working together, the United States, South Korea, and China should take this as an opportunity to induce the young and inexperienced North Korea leader to give up nuclear weapons and join the international community by increasing both the pressure on his regime and the credibility of their offer of incentives for finally taking the right course. 

Gi-Wook Shin is director of Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. David Straub is associate director of Stanford’s Korean Studies Program and a former State Department Korean affairs director.

A later version of this article was published by the Christian Science Monitor, a joint initiative of two academic research networks, the East Asia Bureau of Economic Research and the South Asian Bureau of Economic Research.

Shin was interviewed in NK News on Jang’s removal from power, the article is available in Korean only. Straub analyzed the execution with three other experts in an article in East Asia Forum, a news agency at the forefront of North Korean news coverage. Straub was also quoted in the CBC News and the MK News.

William J. Perry was only 18 when he found himself surrounded by death, a young U.S. Army mapping specialist in Japan during the Army of Occupation. The atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and World War II had just come to an end. 

“The vast ruins that once had been the great city of Tokyo – nothing, nothing had prepared me for such utter devastation that was wrought by massive waves of firebombing rained down by American bomber attacks,” said Perry, who was then shipped off to the island of Okinawa in the aftermath of the last great battle of WWII.

More than 200,000 soldiers and civilians had been killed in that closing battle of 1945, codenamed Operation Iceberg. 

“Not a single building was left standing; the island was a moonscape denuded of trees and vegetation,” Perry told a rapt audience during a recent speech. “The smell of death was still lingering.” 

The young man quickly understood the staggering magnitude of difference in the destruction caused by traditional firepower and these new atomic bombs.

 “It had taken multiple strikes by thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of high explosive bombs to lay waste to Tokyo,” he recalls. “The same had been done to Hiroshima and then to Nagasaki with just one plane – and just one bomb. Just one bomb. 

“The unleashing of this colossal force indelibly shaped my life in ways that I have now come to see more clearly,” said Perry, who would go on to become the 19^th secretary of defense. “It was a transforming experience. In many ways – I grew up from it.” 

William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform.

William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform.  Photo Credit: U.S. Army

Now, nearly seven decades later, the 86-year-old Perry has come full circle. His new winter course will take students back to his fateful days in Japan after the United States became the first – and last – nation to use atomic weapons. He’ll go through the Cold War, the arms race and expanding nuclear arsenals, and today’s potential threats of nuclear terrorism and regional wars provoked by North Korea, Iran or South Asia. 

Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday & Today (IPS 249) – to serve as the backdrop for an online course at Stanford next year – concludes with the declaration Perry made in 2007: The world must rid itself entirely of nuclear weapons. And students will get a primer on how to get involved in organizations that are working on just that. 

“They did not live through the Cold War, so they were never exposed to the dangers and therefore it doesn’t exist to them; it’s just not in their world,” Perry said of millennial and younger students. “I want to make them aware of what the dangers were and how those dangers have evolved.”

Perry and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, both Democrats, joined former Republican Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger in launching a series of OpEds in The Wall Street Journal (the first in 2007) that went viral. Together they outlined how nations could work together toward a world without nuclear weapons.

“I think I have some responsibility since I helped build those weapons – and I think that time is running out,” Perry said in an interview. 

Perry helped shore up the U.S. nuclear arsenal as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, procuring nuclear weapons delivery systems for the Carter administration. Later, as secretary of defense for President Bill Clinton, his priority became the dismantling of nuclear weapons around the world. 

Today, he works on the Nuclear Security Project along with Shultz, Kissinger and Nunn. Former New York Times correspondent Philip Taubman documents their bipartisan alliance in the book, “The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb.” That fifth cold warrior is Sidney Drell, the renowned Stanford physicist and co-founder of CISAC. 

Taubman, a consulting professor at CISAC, will guest lecturer in Perry’s class, along with CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker, David Holloway, Martha Crenshaw and Scott Sagan. Other speakers are expected to include Shultz, a distinguished fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution; Andrei Kokoshin, deputy of the Russian State Duma; Ashton B. Carter, who just stepped down as deputy secretary of defense; Joseph Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Joeseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund.

The world is far from banning the bomb. According to the Ploughshares Fund, an estimated 17,300 nuclear weapons remain in the global stockpile, the majority of which are in Russia and the United States.

                                                                                                CyperusMedia.com

President Barack Obama declared shortly after taking office in his first foreign policy speech in Prague that because the United States was the only country to have used nuclear weapons, Washington “has a moral responsibility to act.” 

“So today, I state clearly and with conviction, America’s commitment to seek the peace

and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” Obama said back in May 2009. 

Perry – a senior fellow at CISAC who received his BS and MS from Stanford and a PhD from Pennsylvania State University, all in mathematics – laments the regression of the movement to dismantle the nuclear legacy of the Cold War. 

Obama has so far not acted on his pledge in his contentious second term, as China and Russia expand their stockpiles. North Korea and Iran are attempting to build nuclear weapons and India and Pakistan are building more fissile material. The U.S. Senate still has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the U.S. and Russia have not moved forward on a follow-up to the New START Treaty. 

Perry recognizes that the issue is slipping from the public conscience, particularly among young people. So he’s putting his name and experience behind a Stanford Online course slated to go live next year. It will correspond with the release of his memoir, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink” and will take a more documentary approach, weaving together key moments in Perry’s career with lectures, archival footage and interviews and conversations between Perry and his colleagues and counterparts. 

"Bill Perry has had a remarkable career and this project draws on his unparalleled experience over a pivotal period in history," said John Mitchell, vice provost for online learning. "We hope his brilliant reflections will be useful to everyone with an interest in the topic, and to teachers and students everywhere." 

At the heart of his winter course, online class and memoir are what Perry calls the five great lessons he learned in the nuclear age. The first four are grim remnants of what he witnessed over the years: the destructive nature of the atomic bombs on Japan; his mathematical calculations about the number of deaths from nuclear warfare; his work for the CIA during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and one pre-dawn call in 1978 from the North American Aerospace Defense Command saying there were 200 missiles headed toward the United States from the Soviet Union. That turned out to be a false, but terrifying alarm. 

His fifth final lesson is hopeful, if not cautionary. It goes like this: 

As secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997, Perry oversaw the dismantling of 8,000 nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union and the United States and helped the former Soviet states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus to go entirely non-nuclear. In that mission, he often visited Pervomaysk in the Ukraine, which was once the Soviet Union’s largest ICBM site, with 700 nuclear warheads all aimed at targets in the United States. 

On his final trip to Pervomaysk in 1996, he joined the Russian and Ukrainian defense ministers to plant sunflowers where those missiles had once stood. 

“So reducing the danger of nuclear weapons is not a fantasy; it has been done,” Perry said. “I will not accept that it cannot be done. I shall do everything I can to ensure nuclear weapons will never again be used – because I believe time is not on our side.”