When Syd Seiler arrived on the Korean Peninsula as a young U.S. military intelligence officer, the founder of North Korea’s ruling dynasty was still building some of the country’s first nuclear facilities.
“That’s a failure of deterrence?” he asked, rhetorically. “That’s nonsense. We’re deterring an attack.”
Having cut North Koreans off from most contact with the outside world, Kim Jong Un, his father and his grandfather before him have seen their regime’s survival as lying in convincing their people the country is a worker’s paradise under threat from the outside world, and only the Kim family and its nuclear weapons can protect them, the former intelligence officer said.
Worrisome possible outcomes include Russia helping North Korea beef up “its pretty antiquated ... museum-ready” conventional forces or its weapons of mass destruction, Seiler said. But Seiler and others see growing reasons to worry now about what Kim may have planned for South Korea, its democratically governed and U.S.-allied neighbor.
Denial or wishful thinking may have led some in the West to overlook the implications of the growing threat for a time, he said, although the intelligence community was well aware. Among his experiences in North Korea that stood out, Seiler pointed to watching a landmark 1983 Korean television show. Unscripted, the show turned into an emotional, marathon,divided under Japanese colonization or during World War II and the Korean War.
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