beautiful women, eating caviar and drinking champagne, and driving the fastest cars with the latest technology. The embodiment of the consumerist culture, he created desire for those products and that lifestyle. Sean Connery’s Bond, six foot two and muscular, was a composite of the commandos that Ian Fleming, the author of the Bond books, had met during his service in intelligence during World War II. A glamorous guerrilla, perhaps, in Kim Jong Il’s mind, James Bond single-handedly outfoxed, outcharmed, and outhumored every type of villain. But if Bond was too perfectly coiffed at all times, Rambo was raw masculinity, fighting in tattered clothing and defeating better-equipped and more numerous foes, often using makeshift weapons, the element of surprise, and sheer grit.
The twin images of Bond and Rambo probably resonated with Kim Jong Il because, like his father and the regime’s hagiography, they taught him just how glamorous guerrilla warfare could be. Victory is these heroes’ unwavering destiny. North Korea’s postwar guerrilla tactics during Jong Il’s grooming process were likewise calculated to enhance his father’s martial credentials and to allow the pampered son to revel in the reflected glory of those aggressive acts. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, North Korea had the fourth-largest standing army in the Communist bloc, with around four hundred thousand personnel. In the 1970s, as the succession process ramped up, the country’s armed forces were boosted to around six hundred thousand, with a corresponding increase in their capability and mobility through upgrades in conventional weapons systems. Additional investment in its one hundred thousand highly trained commando units enabled North Korea to insert thousands of operatives deep into South Korea, according to a declassified 1979 CIA assessment.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, North Korea conducted a series of deadly terrorist acts: attempting a botched infiltration of South Korea’s Blue House, shooting down a U.S. reconnaissance plane, killing the South Korean president’s wife, digging a series of tunnels through the Demilitarized Zone in an effort to infiltrate the South, and ambushing a South Korean delegation in Burma, killing nearly everyone in the president’s cabinet. CIA intelligence analysts concluded that the military buildup was consistent with an overall reunification strategy that Kim Il Sung kept as a core objective of the North Korean state. According to the 1979 intelligence estimate, the military buildup indicated a “three-pronged approach by strengthening the North as a revolutionary base for reunification, promoting the growth of revolutionary forces in South Korea, and working to gain support from other revolutionary forces around the world.” The military emphasis—a push to constantly invoke its guerrilla past—had “effectively subordinated all of North Korea’s domestic and foreign policies to the overriding goal of national reunification under North Korean control.”
As the political scientist Samuel Huntington has pointed out, for all of these aggressive moves, guerrilla combat “is a form of warfare by which the strategically weaker side assumes the tactical offensive in selected forms, times, and places.” Since World War II, nuclear weapons have allowed the “weak [to] compensate for conventional inferiority.” By the time the elder Kim announced his son as his successor in 1980, North Korea’s fortunes were already in steady decline as a result of decades of economic mismanagement, isolation, and the violent suppression of any perceived or real dissent. Both Kims privately acknowledged North Korea’s waning prospects, but rather than admitting the problems and undertaking economic reforms, the regime chose its survival above all else, encasing itself in the ideology of juche, suryong, and, under Kim Jong Il, songun, or “military first.” Their tools were coercion, violence, repression, and propaganda to create a culture of fear. Stoking anti-Americanism and memories of the all too recent horrors of Japanese colonialism and the Fatherland Liberation War, they kept their people pliant.
NUCLEAR DREAMS
When Kim Jong Il took over after Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994, the world that his father created had crumbled. This privileged and shielded son of a dictator, with no war experience, had to manage a complex strategic environment in which his country’s traditional protectors and allies, China and Russia, had abandoned North Korea in favor of engaging with the West and South Korea. The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s meant that Pyongyang had to be much smarter and more agile in its dealings with the outside world. Meanwhile, South Korea, which since its founding in 1948 had been governed by a series of authoritarian leaders, had embraced democracy. Thanks to its impressive export-oriented policies and its alliance with