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Far too often, governments behave like toddlers. They’re fickle. They don’t like to share. And good luck getting them to pay attention to any problem that isn’t directly in front of them. They like to push each other to the brink, and often do. But when they don’t, it’s usually because other people enter the proverbial room. Private citizens who step up and play peacemaker when their governments won’t or can’t. People who strive for collaboration and understanding, and sometimes end up finding it in unlikely places. Those people and the work they do, they’re the reason we’re all still here.
This season, we’ll hear from scientists, analysts, and idealists who have gone to crazy lengths just for a shot at making peace and building understanding From smoke-filled rooms in North Korea to secret labs in the Soviet Union… to the lawless seas, and even to the depths of outer space (or, at least, the conference rooms where they talk about the depths of outer space). This podcast tells the stories about the people holding us back from the brink.
Hosted by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor and scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies on the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies faculty. Previously, he served as Director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and Executive Director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He is the founder of ArmsControlWonk.com, a leading resource on disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation issues.
Produced by Gilded Audio and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
OPEN
MUSIC
JEFFREY: My friend Peter Hayes has some wild stories.
PETER: … I had to break out of that house arrest, which I did, but it was not easy. It involved quite a high level of orchestration to get out of that isolated guest house with barbed wires and guards with bayonets…
Yeah, the one I’m thinking of starts with Peter receiving a mysterious message from North Korea.
PETER: You remember telegrams?
Peter has overestimated my age, but I’ll let it go. Back in the day, Peter was an expert on nuclear energy issues. One of his wildest stories begins when he started receiving telegrams from a very unlikely place.
PETER: I would get a telegram each year from one Kim Yong-son in North Korea saying, “Would you please come to North Korea?”
Peter doesn’t remember exactly when the telegrams started, but it was sometime in the 1980s, after he published his first book.
The book was a warning
[01:00]
about the risk of nuclear war breaking out in Korea. And the man sending Peter the telegrams from North Korea was Kim Yong-sun, a very high-ranking member of North Korea’s ruling communist party, the Workers’ Party of Korea.
Kim Yong-sun had quite the reputation. Diplomats liked working with him. I’ve seen Kim described as “a hard-drinking, partying buddy of Kim Jong Il, a ladies man and a devotee of high living.” Aint not party like a Worker’s Party party, I guess.
Kim wasn’t a diplomat. He didn’t even have an official position in the foreign ministry. But Peter knew he couldn’t pass up this invitation.
MUS out
PETER: I got one of these telegrams and I sent back a reply saying, “Yes, love to come. When?” Silence for a month. And then the telegram came back, returned.
PETER: The post office didn’t know that there was a North Korea and where Pyongyang was. So they'd sent it to Seoul in South Korea who'd
[02:00]
sat on it for a month whilst they were trying to figure out what this was about… and I went down to the post office and said, “Look, you idiots. You know, just like Americans think that Australia is Austria, there is actually a place called North Korea and you do need to send the telegram there please.”
I just want to state for the record that postal workers work really hard. But I get why Peter was frustrated. If you’re not an expert on nuclear energy, which, you know, Peter is, it’s easy to think of North Korea as some faraway, almost mythical country. Not somewhere you would want to send a letter or a telegram. A small miracle happened, and Peter’s message somehow managed to get through.
PETER: And within a couple of days I had a reply this time saying, “Come. Come, now.”
JEFFREY: Why do you think it was so important to the North Koreans, I mean, why do you think you were able to leverage—?
PETER: They wanted to build a bridge of confidence. They wanted to build some trust and to demonstrate that they were willing to cooperate with Americans if they changed their hostile policy and this was an
[03:00]
opportunity to do that.
MUS—INTRO
Not many people think “opportunity” when they think about North Korea. But Peter, he saw an opportunity here. He knew as well as anybody that North Korea was a real country, full of real people, with real needs. He knew they were dealing with an energy crisis. He knew they had a nuclear weapons program. He knew they wanted energy independence. And he knew no one wants nuclear armageddon. So he was willing to bet that if he met with Kim Yong-sun face-to-face, there was a good chance they could turn this opportunity into a concrete step toward lasting peace.
It may sound a little quixotic. Because it is. Because Peter was headed to North Korea to go tilting at windmills.
________________
CLIP MONTAGE
RUMSFELD: Why would they do anything they do? …Try to build a nuclear power plant. They don’t need a nuclear power plant!
MCCAIN: Yes, I think it’s time that we talk about regime change in North Korea.
[04:00]
COLBERT: Well what do you actually talk about with a—and I don’t mean this insultingly—a madman, murderous dictator?
RODMAN: Well actually, we talk about basketball
RUMSFELD: We have a very strange situation in that country … I gotta remember that I’m speaking about diplomacy here, and be diplomatic.
MUSIC OUT
I. SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES
Peter lives in California, but he was visiting family in Australia when the COVID lockdown hit. He decided to ride it out there; or maybe I should say, float it out.
PETER: I moved onto a vessel, in a place called Evan's Head, just south of Brisbane on a river. And it's a very lovely vessel, and it's become where I sit and work
JEFFREY: Does the boat have a name?
PETER: Uh This vessel is called Aquabelle.
If you hear birds in the background of Peter’s audio, it’s because he was still on that boat when I spoke with him in
[05:00]
November of 2022. Despite Mother Nature’s attempts to wash him away in a flood a few months back.
PETER: I was in the middle of the river for five days watching the river go past with ballistic missiles in the form of logs.
I hope we’ve established by now that Peter is… unconventional.
PETER: So we are actually completely autonomous from the grid. We have a satellite phone. We have backup computers, and so we're not going off the air unless we're hit by, well, by an asteroid or a global nuclear war.
Peter’s not a doomsday prepper, he just knows a little too much. Occupational hazard.
Peter and Lyuba Zarsky, his partner and now my colleague at Middlebury, co-founded the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability in 1992. Fun fact: I applied for an internship at the Nautilus Institute when I was a college kid. Totally rejected. It’s okay, Peter, I’m over it.
Still, there was a reason
[06:00]
I wanted to intern at Nautilus. They did really cool work! Lyuba describes it as “action research.”
LYUBA: We did work that one could say, “well, that's kind of like investigative journalism.” We did work that some might say is, “well, that's kind of like scholarly work” … but the point that made us different is that the work was in some senses, hitched to a social movement.
Specifically, the anti-nuclear movement.
LYUBA: And when we started, the problem we were addressing was the risk of nuclear war in the Pacific, in the Asia-Pacific region.
That region was volatile—and still is— because Korea has spent the last hundred years being a battleground for the big powers around it, starting with Japan.
PETER: To really understand Kim Yong-sun, you have to know that as a child, as a 12 year old, he watched the Japanese Imperial Force kill his parents in front of him, and he became the senior son responsible for raising
[07:00]
the children.
Kim came of age during a war that was every bit as brutal as the occupation that killed his parents. The Korean War killed five million people, most of them innocent Korean civilians, and left the peninsula divided between the capitalist South and the communist North, which calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or DPRK. There is still no permanent peace treaty between them, just an uneasy truce.
MUS
The border between them is not something natural like a river or a mountain range. It doesn’t represent any kind of historical, cultural, or ethnic divide. It is just an arbitrary line, separating those who were north of it at the end of the Korean War from those who were south of it. Looking at the situation today, Americans sometimes conclude that Koreans, or at least North Koreans, want things this way. But most don’t.
[08:00]
Many Koreans hold the Great Powers responsible for what happened to their country. And many believe that it doesn’t have to be this way.
In Peter’s view, that was Kim’s goal: a true, lasting peace in his homeland.
PETER: He was a supremely realistic geo-strategic thinker, which is why he wanted to end the Korean War, make amends with the United States, and actually detach themselves from the orbit that they're in between two black stars alternating between China and the Soviet Union.
Kim was living proof of something a lot of Americans don’t understand: While North Korea is ruled by a single party, that party isn’t a monolith. We may not get to hear or see their debates, but there is disagreement, even when it comes to how to deal with the West. We’ll never know who Kim Yong-sun had to convince or how he did it,
[09:00]
but somehow, he got permission to invite Peter to visit.
MUS out
PETER: I don't like the North Korean regime. I find it extremely onerous to go there. The monitoring is very intense. The cigarette smoke and the alcohol is very difficult to deal with. And your interpersonal space is much closer in Korean culture than in American or Western culture so that smoke is right in your face. It's not across the room … This is like three people smoking within six feet of you all the time.
The cars are pretty nice, though.
MUS
PETER: There was a red Mercedes-Benz waiting for me, one of the little sedans—blue sedans are Ministry of Foreign Affairs cars, red are party.
Honestly, I thought Peter might have misremembered about this until he sent us a video from one of his trips to North Korea—There it was! A dark red Benz. One of these cars arrived at Peter’s hotel to pick him up.
[10:00]
He got in, it drove him out of the city, and then it stopped.
PETER: I was taken out of the first Mercedes, put in the second one, and they told the first guy to leave in no uncertain and very unfriendly terms, I have to tell you.
The second car pulled away and headed toward their destination: Kim Yong-sun’s dacha.
PETER: …out in a classic North Korean landscape surrounded by pine trees with his personal staff. And we proceeded to talk for about four or five hours. His style was to give a three-hour lecture, and… there would be a tougher-than-thou lecture with the recording button on, cause everyone's recorded, including the senior figures by the regime for political correctness. And he would just drop a hint as to where he was heading at the very end. You had to listen really carefully.
Listening carefully to North Korean officials is a skill. Peter had to just sort of endure the propaganda. Stuff Kim knew was propaganda.
[11:00]
Actually, stuff Kim knew that Peter knew that Kim knew was propaganda.
But Peter listened and eventually figured out the real reason he was there. North Korea was struggling to supply its 20 million citizens with power.
They wanted the West to help them build nuclear power plants. And when you think about it… of course they did!
MUS out
North Korea was small and politically isolated, and relied on the Soviet Union for most of its needs. With aid from Russia drying up, the power had to come from somewhere, ideally inside North Korea itself. So, what if instead of threatening to destroy North Korea over its nuclear program, we worked together to solve their energy crisis?
If all this sounds too good to be true, well, it was.
MUS
PETER: While we're sitting there and I'm explaining to him that their grid is too small to ever have a light water reactor and they'd risk a meltdown if they did,
[12:00]
the lights went out. Completely dark, you know, grid failure.
SFX—lightbulb fizzling
MUS out
And he proceeded as if nothing had happened for nearly 20 minutes, telling me that everything was perfect with their grid and they would have no problems.
MUS
At that point, Peter could’ve written off the nuclear power plant idea, Kim himself, and frankly the whole country as nuts. He could’ve said, “Well, good luck with that. Could you please threaten another driver into taking me back to my hotel?” But there he was, in the room with a senior official of the Workers Party, a drinking buddy of North Korea’s elite, who in his own verbose way
MUS out
was asking him for help.
BEAT
Peter was not the president of the United States—he couldn’t just give Kim a couple of nuclear power plants. And Kim didn’t have much actual authority, either. At some level they were just two guys sitting in what I assume was a very smoky and dimly lit room,
[13:00]
searching for a way to bridge the gap between North Korea and the West.
II. THE WAY WILL BE OPENING
After that visit, Peter and Kim kept in touch.
PETER: There was no phone line to North Korea. AT&T, then the monopoly phone supplier, was not allowed to have a phone service to North Korea because of the sanctions … So my brother would divert my call from San Francisco to Australia to his number, to the number in North Korea, and it would go through.
PETER: I never got billed for those calls because they weren't on any existing phone system where you got billed.
Spoken like a true NGO executive.
BEAT
North Korea continued to press for nuclear power plants. And in 1994, the US actually agreed to help build them. As part of that deal, the United States agreed to provide North Korea with nuclear reactors. But actually hooking those reactors up to North Korea’s crumbling
[14:00]
energy grid? That was a different matter entirely.
DAVID: The problem was the DPRK’s electricity grid was both A, too small and B, not in good enough shape to accept the power from those reactors. So if those reactors had ever gone online, they would not have been able to operate without being directly connected to the South Korean grid.
That’s energy expert David von Hippel. You can’t swing a cat on this podcast without hitting a von Hippel.
SFX—cat meows
Pretty quickly, the deal between the U.S. and North Korea had started to fall apart for the same reasons the deal between the U.S. and Iran would fall apart. That’s when Kim Yong-sun reached back out to Peter and he in turn reached out to David. The deal might be dead, but I think Kim wanted to show on a fundamental level that collaboration between the United States and North Korea was still possible. So they arranged another exchange.
PETER: They sent
[15:00]
three technicians, one controller and one party guy to Berkeley, California. And we also took them to Washington. And we did trainings at the World Bank. We did renewable energy trainings. We took them to the wind turbine facility…
Of course, they didn’t travel alone. One member of the delegation, in particular, stuck out in David’s memory.
DAVID: He was this young, wiry, fierce man … he was the minder for their delegation. So, taut as a wire.
A “minder” is kind of like a “chaperone,” but instead of high schoolers, you’re monitoring North Koreans traveling outside the country. And instead of preventing them from dancing too close…
DAVID: He was making sure none of the North Koreans who came to the United States were speaking to anybody they shouldn't have or saying anything they shouldn't have.
You say “minder.” I say “snitch.” Remember, not everyone in North Korea was crazy about the idea of cooperating with the United States.
MUS
[16:00]
By this point, it’s 1997, about a decade after Peter started receiving telegrams from Pyongyang. Now, he and Lyuba were hosting a delegation of North Korean engineers at their house for Thanksgiving.
LYUBA: Frankly the food around Thanksgiving is so bland compared to the kimchi and the, you know, spiciness of Korean food and here they were having, you know, mashed potatoes with gravy. I thought, “Well, if it was a problem, they didn't let us know.”
There were Peter and Lyuba – passing the cranberry sauce to some guys from a country many Americans said was hell-bent on destroying us. You can probably understand why it felt like anything was possible in that moment.
LYUBA: There was a sense that there was an opening, that there was an opening, within North Korea…and Peter was able to make something happen in that opening.
Before the delegation returned to the DPRK, they signed an agreement with the Nautilus Institute.
[17:00]
A decade of discussions, telegrams, phone calls, and false starts had paid off. Peter was going to take a team to North Korea and show them, through a working demonstration, what real energy independence in the DPRK could look like.
PETER: The hypothesis was, it's possible to do business with North Koreans. And the underlying assumption was it’s possible to do business with North Koreans if you do what you say you're going to do. Nothing more, nothing less.
MUS out
III. THE WINDMILLS IN THE CABBAGE PATCH
MUS
In May of 1998, Peter took a team of five people, including David Von Hippel, to North Korea. Their mission: Go to the tiny village of Unhari, assess its energy needs, and then meet those needs by constructing a series of wind turbines. The turbines were not going to solve North Korea's energy crisis, but at a time
[18:00]
when neither side had any faith in the other, they could serve as a proof of concept.
DAVID: They were a demonstration that it was possible for people from outside the DPRK to work productively with North Koreans.
North Korea was desperately poor and isolated. For Peter and his crew, this meant that they had to ship literally everything and anything they might need with them.
PETER: We had to send a small Ace Hardware store with us cuz there's no hardware store down the road
Everything they could conceivably need, from the blades of the windmills all the way down to the spare screwdrivers, were purchased and packed into a shipping container in Berkeley. The container went to South Korea, then to a North Korean port, where… it just sat around, until someone got a phone call.
DAVID: There was only one operating crane in Nampo…And it took a very high party official calling the operator and saying, “Move the ship that is now being unloaded. Move our ship in there, take that one shipping container off
[19:00]
and…and do it now, because our, colleagues from the United States are arriving tonight.”
Like I said, Kim Yong-sun had connections.
The team traveled to Unhari, a farming village of roughly 2,000 people.
DAVID: On the coast of the DPRK, it's fairly flat because it's mostly reclaimed land. So, it's tidal marshes that had been filled in for agriculture, growing mostly rice, and some other things like cabbage… literally we put our wind farm in a cabbage patch.
There was electric power in Unhari, but North Korea’s nuclear power plants were old—we’re talking pre-Korean War, pre-World War II, Japanese colonial-era infrastructure. The grid was so unreliable that the main source of energy in the village was just plain old coal.
DAVID: And that coal would be delivered to a depot, basically just a house and a yard
[20:00]
along the main road, and they would make briquettes, coffee can-sized briquettes. … So this was the fuel that they used for their stove.
David knew this because he went door-to-door, asking the villagers how they got energy and how they used it.
MUS in
Before they could power the village, his team had to learn what they were actually powering.
DAVID: And in order to ensure randomness, I whittled some dice out of a spare piece of wood. And we rolled those dice in order to figure out which households we were gonna visit.
“Knock, knock. Oh hi, don’t mind me, I’m just the first American you’ve ever met, coming to take scrupulous notes about the objects in your house.”
DAVID: I would look around and say, you know, “Do you use your refrigerator?” “No, we have it, but we don't use it. It's not, it's not plugged in.” And each house had a TV, every house had a TV because that's a major means of communication between the state and the people. Along with a picture of Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung,
[21:00]
canted to look down at you, just like pictures of Jesus in Catholic households.
DAVID: I look up in the corner and there's, as a speaker up there, and I said, “Was that speaker associated with your radio?” “No,” I said, “Associated with the TV?” “No.” “What is it?” “Well, it comes from the state.” Oh, that's interesting. ... The purpose of it is so that the authorities can communicate with each household immediately …
Let’s just sit for a minute and think about how unbearable the last several years would have been if every American household featured an invasive government speaker.
MUS out
[CLIP: Trump says windmills cause cancer]
[0:24-]
SFX: speaker turning on, modify to sound like Trump is coming through it
TRUMP: If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75% in value and they say the noise causes cancer! You told me that one, okay. And of course it’s like a graveyard for birds!
We really dodged a bullet there.
Anyway, David eventually completed his survey, with the help of some translators. Both sides,
[22:00]
the Americans and the North Koreans, had one guy with them who spoke the other side’s language. If neither of those guys was around, you had to find two other guys, an American and a North Korean who could talk to each other in Chinese.
[CLIP: Unhari footage]
MICK: So you need to be familiar with how tight they are now.
NORTH KOREAN: [translates]
Communication was crucial. This wasn’t a photo opp, this was an active construction site. The language barrier complicated what was already a very complicated task. Ever tried to manually assemble a wind turbine? Yeah… me neither.
[CLIP: Unhari footage]
MICK: …and grab a couple of cables, and pull on them sideways
DAVID: Well, no cranes were available. So… we built the first level six feet tall. And then we stood on that to build the next level, and then we stood on that to build the next level and so on … and this meant that somebody from our team would be working with a North Korean engineer, standing together on top of this thing,
[23:00]
with very little support, and assembling with bolts and nuts and pieces of metal, this tower.
[CLIP: Unhari footage]
MICK: These are crane signals and I do them without thinking about them.
DAVID: We sometimes had to slow them down, say, you know, “wait, wait, wait. You know, you gotta be a little more safety conscious about that,” because their safety culture and our safety culture are not the same.
I’ll say. David and Peter are both adamant that the North Koreans were very good engineers. Still, listening to the recording Peter sent us, it sounds like American safety culture and North Korean drinking culture were occasionally at odds:
[CLIP: Unhari video clip 3]
MICK: We’re gonna raise the tower. We’re going to raise the tower.
MICK: This is tea?
JIM: This is tea.
MICK: When I see amber fluids…
NORTH KOREAN: It’s not beer.
[24:00]
The placement of the grounding wire, which would keep lightning from destroying the turbines, also caused some friction.
PETER: Their engineers wanted to do it North Korean practice, which was to ground it in the powerhouse. And they took offense at our insistence … And they threatened to kill us if we insisted. I'm not kidding. They were very angry because this was an insult to their national pride and, really, I guess you would have to say their manhood.
I tell you this because this moment could have been the end of the story. The way Peter tells it, it could have been the end of Peter and David. Work stopped, and at this point it looked like the best case scenario was simply getting out of North Korea.
But Peter didn’t walk away. He knew how to resolve problems like this in North Korea.
PETER: Their head of delegation and I went out that night. Now I don't drink, but that night I got very drunk. I had to because that's how you work these issues in North Korea.
[25:00]
And again, I said to the counterpart, “Look, if someone gets killed by this, you're gonna blame us. We're not gonna let you do that. So here's what we're gonna do.”
Peter agreed to do things the North Korean way, as long as his counterpart would swear that nobody would be allowed into the powerhouse. When Peter and his team returned, they would bring with them safety manuals from all over the world that explained why and how to ground the wire in the actual ground.
PETER: “We'll even translate them into Korean for you. But that's what we're gonna do. And if that's acceptable, that's how we'll proceed.” And that's how we resolved that particular crisis where they were literally threatening to kill my engineers and we were threatening to leave the next day.
Work did proceed. The grounding wire was grounded the North Korean way. And the team returned six months later, as planned, with strict safety protocols. But this wasn’t the last time the two sides would butt heads. In fact, this wasn’t even the last disagreement over the damn grounding wire.
One day, as the windmills continued to rise, the crews took a lunch break.
[26:00]
When it was time to get back to work, their protocol demanded that someone go and check on the grounding wire, to ensure that there wasn't a current going through it. But on this afternoon, some big-shot official from the Korean Workers Party was there. He wanted to skip that step. This is another moment where Peter’s years of dealing with North Korean officials—and, I am guessing, the fact that he is well over six feet tall—paid off.
PETER: I said, “Look, engineer—I think his name was Lee. I can't remember—We're happy to do that, but only on one condition, that you go over and piss on the grounding wire. If you're willing to do that, we’re willing to proceed without a safety check.” He lost face in front of his team as a result.
The engineer whose name may or may not have been Lee decided to let the safety check proceed. At least, that’s Peter's version of the story. For the record, most of the interactions that happened during these trips seemed significantly friendlier.
DAVID: One of the engineers that I was working with, North Korean engineers … spent
[27:00]
some time in Japan as a kid, and he learned a little English from watching American cartoons while he was in Japan … so you know we'd be gesticulating, put the bolt in here while we've got these two eyelets lined up. And, and, and I taught 'em the phrase “piece of cake.” So when we get it done, we'd say “piece of cake.”
Hearing their accounts of this project, I can’t help but feel that you have to have someone like Peter to make a project like this happen in the first place. But you also need someone like David to make sure they get home alive.
MUS
Both of those stories, though, point to something important: It required serious trust to get these windmills built. It doesn’t matter if you were 100 feet in the air installing dangerous electrical equipment, or down on the ground, risking summary execution over a safety protocol. You had to know who you’re dealing with, trust their commitment to the project, and trust them to trust you. Everyone had to hold up their end of the bargain.
[28:00]
PETER: You build trust with North Koreans … by doing what you say you're gonna do and speaking the truth. And if the truth hurts, they need to hear it. And they know that. And they'll respect you for that.
DAVID: Once they realized we weren't there to take advantage of them, we weren't there to make fools of them, we were there to help them. Once they realized that we got along really well.
Oh, and that wiry hardass who had accompanied the North Koreans? Their minder, the snitch? In Pyongyang, David even managed a little sports diplomacy with him.
DAVID: By the time we left in 2000, he was playing frisbee with us in the lobby of the Koryo Hotel in Pyongyang
IV. “THE NEEDLE DOESN’T SEEM TO GET PUSHED”
By the time David was tossing a frisbee with that wiry hardass, it was 2000 and the Unhari Wind Turbine Project was done. There were now seven windmills, standing in a cabbage patch
[29:00]
powering a rural North Korean village.
MUS out
DAVID: We did a rural energy survey. We put together a powerhouse. We installed seven little wind turbines. We connected a number of households and a clinic to this system. That was pretty remarkable, for 16 days of work in the DPRK.
Seven wind turbines, supplying reliable electric power to a village that had been running on coal and a prayer. Well, it’s a communist country. Maybe not so much praying. There was also an eighth turbine powering a well, providing Unhari with much-needed drinking water.
LYUBA: It seems like there was a moment when such a project was possible and a moment when it felt that this kind of approach could really move the needle in the larger context. The project was brilliant, I mean it was brilliant!
MUS
[30:00]
…What's been extremely frustrating is that the needle doesn't seem to get pushed in North Korea.
Yeah, this business is frustrating. Because now comes the part where I burst your bubble. This story does not end with Kim Jong-il and Bill Clinton sitting down and agreeing to a “windmills not nukes” deal. Instead, we just keep seeing the same old cycle repeat.
MUS out
[CLIP: NK launches ICBM]
[0:00-0:13]
ANCHOR: A new missile launch being called a breakthrough, a successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, North Korea’s official statement celebrating the launch, promising to root out what they see as the US threat.
CLIP: And then, just hours ago, a physical response from the US and South Korea. Each country firing a short range missile in a coordinated event.
[31:00]
Peter’s North Korean collaborator, Kim Yong-sun, died in a car wreck in 2003. Born during the Japanese occupation, Kim died without ever seeing the thing he wanted most – a reunited Korea.
BEAT
Peter got a MacArthur “genius” award for his work in Unhari. That’s a really big deal. Twenty years later though, he says he’s just as worried as ever.
PETER: As our Nuclear Use in Northeast Asia Project showed last year, in short order we were able to come up with 24 different plausible pathways to nuclear war in Northeast Asia. We stopped there because there was no point in coming up with more pathways.
I don’t know about you, but for me, one pathway is plenty.
If that’s not enough of a downer, I have to tell you without any way of getting replacement parts into North Korea, David is pretty much convinced the windmills no longer work. The Unhari Project did not usher in a new age of cooperation and wind power.
MUS
DAVID: The DPRK has not
[32:00]
actually traditionally been self-sufficient in many things, but they want to be, and renewable energy works for that because they're using their own resources, wind and solar resources, for example, to power their country… even on a micro level, with solar foldable tag panels becoming inexpensive, you've seen them blooming on patios of high rises in the DPRK.
And while the divide between North Korea and the West still feels enormous, Peter and David are living proof that you can cross it.
DAVID: I think that the Unhari project really did show that A, it was possible to work with North Koreans and B, they were very interested in these topics. They were interested in taking up the opportunity to work on these technical topics with people from the international community … so it’s really possible just through goodwill and examples of friendship to change people’s minds.
[33:00]
Peter told us that Kim first reached out to him because he wanted to build a bridge of confidence. The thing is, bridges they go both ways. In the early 1990s, a lot of people inside the North Korean system stuck their necks out to strike a deal with the United States. After that deal collapsed, Kim Yong-sun was willing to stick his neck out. Again. I think he wanted to show to other North Koreans that cooperation with the United States was possible. And if Kim couldn't get nuclear reactors from the US government, he was gonna try to get windmills from Peter.
This was a really special moment. I don't know when something like it is going to happen again, if ever. But I do know that there are a lot of people on both sides who do want it to happen, and I really hope that when it does come,
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there will be people like Kim, Peter Lyuba, and David, people who are willing to take a chance and tilt at windmills.
Thanks for listening - I’m Jeffrey Lewis and this is The Reason We’re All Still Here. It's executive produced by me, Andy Chugg and Whitney Donaldson. Special thanks to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. This episode was produced by Stephen Wood, Kelsey Albright, and Olivia Canny. It was written by Stephen Wood and me. Story editing from Sara Joyner. Fact-checking by Charles Richter. Technical direction and engineering by Nick Dooley. Original music by Andy Chugg. Additional production support from Gemma Castelli-Foley. Show art by Ronin Wood and Anton Maryniuk.
[35:00]
Special thanks to Jessica Varnum, Christine Regasa, Megan Larson, and Maggie Taylor.
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