Freeman Unchained

North Korean children skating in capital square; images on TV that night showed tanks; photo by Patrick Thornquist @NPR

“So… North Korea… how scared do you think we should be?”

Inside the U.S. intelligence community, the issue of North Korea’s progress is hotly debated. One problem is that while U.S. spy satellites can monitor the country from overhead, most of North Korea’s nuclear work is done underground. North Korea is so closed off that the CIA has also had trouble recruiting high-level spies inside the country.

International TV broadcasters have been repeatedly showing tanks trundling through Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square in a demonstration of North Korean national power.

But when Patrick Thornquist, a Chicago teacher visiting the North Korean capital at the end of last week, arrived in the square, he was surprised by what he saw. This iconic square — Pyongyang’s political, military and symbolic heart — was full of children rollerblading and shouting with joy.

One of leader Kim Jong Un’s contributions to the nation has been building roller-skating parks and promoting entertainment facilities. And Thornquist was struck by the fact that, on watching the news later that day, it was still featuring footage of tanks.

“It was definitely interesting to see tanks on BBC in the hotel, as if that was that day, when we’d been in that square a couple of hours earlier and nothing like that was happening,” he says.

Bruce Bennett, an expert on North Korea’s military at the RAND Corporation]says he doesn’t know whether North Korea could place a nuclear warhead on a missile, but that South Korean defense experts think it’s possible. “Many of my South Korean colleagues argue they can put a warhead on a missile and may have done so already,” Bennett says. “I don’t know for sure, but my guessing based on what my South Korean colleagues are telling me is that they can.”

Henderson, now an analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said, “Khan holds the abilities of North Korean scientists and engineers in high regard. Although lacking the best technical equipment, they are well trained and determined. I fear Khan was telling the truth about what he saw in North Korea in 1999.”

Ferguson said that to date the North Koreans have also not developed a missile capable of reentering earth’s atmosphere from space, something needed for multistaged long-range missiles capable of hitting the U.S.

“We know that the North Koreans have shared missile technology with the Iranians,” Henderson said. “In light of evidence to the contrary, it would be irresponsible not to assume they have also shared nuclear-weapons technology and possibly centrifuge technology with Iran.”

“On the nuclear-warhead front, I am not aware of significant evidence there has been cooperation between the two countries, but I cannot rule it out either,” he said.

“At the beginning, I was a little bit nervous,” he says. “But one of the guides said, ‘Calm down, we’re all people.’ … What surprised me most is how there really wasn’t any anti-American talk directly to me.”

The message to the domestic audience is that the outside world is bullying North Korea, and its very existence is threatened. This has the effect of uniting its citizens behind their young new leader, no matter how much hardship they’re facing.

The dueling realities have left Thornquist completely baffled after his trip.

“You try to grasp what is real and what is not. You’re trying to find that balance between what your media tells you and what they’re telling you because they’re very far off,” he says. “It’s crazy.”