Hundreds of men and women were sweating in railroad repair work in a flooded area of North Korea’s northeastern Hamgyong Province. They were moving big rocks and wooden poles manually to repair a railway that was washed away last week in what was described as the heaviest rainfall in 60 years. An excavator standing idle with its scoop resting on the ground, apparently out of fuel, was the only machine shown in the Pyongyang TV footage relayed by South Korean networks.

Some in the crowd were in formal suits, indicating they were office workers joining the emergency work under orders from the party. It seemed to be an important project, judging from the large number of people mobilized and their expressions of eagerness before the camera to consume the last ounce of their energy. In the 1950s-60s fashion of the “Chollima Movement” reconstruction campaign, they carried steel rails on their backs to a bank built with rocks picked from a nearby stream.

The North Korean video, apparently aimed to generate international compassion and thereby induce emergency relief, may well impress foreign aid workers into releasing some food and medicine to the disaster area. Still, the parade of human ants in the flooded land conveyed the harsh reality of North Korea today, as did the sights of entire villages buried in mud up to the roofs, the result of deforested hills cut into terraced rice paddies.

It is hard to believe that a destitute country with such primitive industrial foundations and a regime ready to expose such weakness to solicit outside aid could pose serious threats to international security with nuclear bombs and long-range missiles. We need a great deal of composure to look into the unfathomable contrast and foresee what will come of it. 

Since Sept. 9, I have had a fear of the future for the first time in my adult life. Upon hearing the news of another nuclear test with the biggest destructive power yet, I had an image of the grayish last scene of “The Day After,” the ABC feature film I saw while staying in the US in 1983. The lead character, a medical doctor, returns to his Kansas home after a nuclear holocaust and finds the remains of his wife’s wristwatch in the rubble as nuclear ash still falls.

This fear alternates with confidence in the uselessness of the arms of mass destruction the North has built at the cost of international isolation and tribulations for 25 million people. The confidence stems less from our military authorities’ assurances of effective preemptive attack and second strike capabilities than from my own accounts of absurdities in the North.

The past two decades from about the time when Washington and Seoul bore the false hope in a negotiated settlement of the North Korean nuclear issue were a time of great deception and surprises -- with five nuclear tests and numerous rocket launches by the North. Yet, it was also a time of deepening internal absurdities in the North with the collapse of its state-controlled distribution system and severe polarization of the rulers and the ruled. Production shrank from one-thirtieth of South Korea’s to one-fortieth.

The government of Park Geun-hye has practically done nothing either in the direction of upgrading defense posture or reducing tension through bold contacts with the North. After 3 1/2 years of inertia, the president decided to allow the US to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-missile system here as a means to counter North Korean threats, with implicit plans to introduce more such systems on our own in the future.

At the moment, political parties and social institutions have sharply split policies on THAAD in much the way they are split on the questions of independently developing nuclear arms and reintroducing US forces’ tactical nuclear weapons. So internal absurdities are also significant on our part, as these issues will continue to stir our society through the next presidential election campaigns.

Our democratic system is put to a crucial test on its ability to resolve problems with compromise and concession after seemingly endless conflicts between different interest groups. Ultimately, the next president should be one who can take a determined, responsible action to prove that he or she is worth the office and its powers.

We have to admit that pessimism has grown here since Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test with our political and military leaders failing to produce convincing diplomatic and strategic approaches to what has become a real and present danger. Our trust in the US conventional and nuclear arms deployed on and around the Korean Peninsula ready to provide “extended deterrence” for us cannot but be thinning.

However, we also hear a time bomb ticking in Pyongyang, a place lacking sustainability in terms of the system and practice of ruling with ceaseless reports of high-level purges and barbaric executions. The aggravation of political, economic and external conditions there increases the imminence of a regime change regardless of how many long-range missiles they produce and equip with nuclear warheads.

Nightmares have haunted me since Sept. 9. But, I rise every morning with fresh conviction of a just eventuality that is strong enough to beat the fear of a nuclear winter. It comes with an increasingly clear vision of the demise of Kim Jong-un from his uncontrolled tyranny.

He claims the bomb is for survival and self-defense. There is a better way to earn survival and self-defense and not much time is left for him to learn the truth.

By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. He also served as head of the Korean Overseas Information Service. – Ed.