How to Survive 3 Years in North Korea as a Foreigner
mydiplomaticlife.com
mydiplomaticlife.com
> When serving in Iraq or Iran, my biggest fear in those places was always the threat of physical harm, be it ambushes on our person or vehicles, being kidnapped, rocket or mortar attacks on our embassy or accommodation. There were close shaves and the threat and the fear never left you in all of these places. But as far as life in North Korea was concerned, there were none of these fears. Serving in North Korea gave you this strange feeling of being cut off, isolated and very insular and perversely at the same time “safe.”
When one invades the country, they of course won't feel safety (like in Iraq), but when they dont invade country, of course it feels safe, because no one is bombing and shooting locals
If the current US admin could do this, they would.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250409223505/https://mydiploma...
In tech specifically this leads to some surprising results such as transit planning being very ineffective or broken in google maps due to onshore data storage requirements. Subway alignments are regarded as sensitive info
fun fact, Japan and Russia are technically in a state of war too. The World War II hasn't ended. They have never signed a treaty over the Kuril Islands, and they both claim them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_Joint_...
Whenever North Korea threatens them, simply reply with how sorry you are their brother nation feels this way, and you wish them a peaceful and successful future.
Leave the DMZ intact of course, but just unilaterally declare you are not actually at war and have nothing but brotherly love for them.
This article is also from 2021 and things have changed a bit in the North. North Korea changed their constitution a couple of years ago and removed any mention of unification with the South, and defined their territory as basically the existing North/South split (aka 38th parallel). South Korea has been redefined from 'partner in national unity' to 'enemy to be destroyed, by nuclear weapons if need be'.
There's a lot of pretty interesting analysis of North Korea at the 38 North blog (https://www.38north.org/), among other good sources.
As to the lack of fear of physical harm, this was reported from a very privileged position where that safety was guaranteed by the clearly willing host. As a civilian visitor I wouldn't feel that confident. One odd look or an unfortunate question an official didn't take a liking to, will get you into questioning. So I'm told.
- can't complain!
> Surprisingly yes.
> Did you get many opportunities to travel within the country?
> Surprisingly yes.
And surprisingly title is: "How To Survive 3 Years in NK"
These people are so biased, they show that bias even when they don't have anything bad to say. Poor people in that country might say how to survive, but not a member of diplomatic corpus
It’s about 3 (I think? Been a while since I watched) US soldiers that defected to NK during the Korean War. One dude stayed for decades and defended NK intensely in this doc, going so far as to star in propaganda movies against the US while he was there. Wild stuff
There is a huge amount of money invested currently by the gov into making it a better country, it's hard to believe tho.
It's relatively hard to get information without translating South korean forums because the western news just straight up shit on everything related to NK and almost NEVER show anything progressing over there, which is false.
Also, it didn't work. Not in Iran and not even in Venezuela.
Also comrades from other countries would probably support them.
- An enormous amount of artillery pointed at South Korea. South Korea would likely suffer the worst outcome in any intervention into North Korea.
- A nuclear-armed power who is truly ideological. Unlike Maduro, merely killing the leader is unlikely to dissuade the North Koreans. (a lesson the Trump admin is currently learning in Iran)
Self-sufficiency and exclusion from global trade can be very expensive for a nation long-term (a cautionary tale, since those ideals are a bit of a siren call nowadays to many Americans, after getting quite wealthy by doing the exact opposite).
Even short of a nuclear response Seoul is in range of conventional artillery from North Korea and is dug in enough you couldn't destroy them all before the were able to do significant damage to Seoul.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea_and_weapons_of_mas...
[1] https://missilethreat.csis.org/country/dprk/ 10,000 km gets you to the west coast and significant parts of the western US, 13000 covers the whole of the US. NK has the Hwasong-15 with a nominal range of 15000 km...
"Passcode to the Third Floor" describes this instance and other missed opportunities to undermine the North Korean regime.
One funny side event to all this was when North Korea accidentally (?) revealed their secret uranium enrichment program when providing records from their Yongbyon reactor. They claimed at the time they didn't have a uranium enrichment program but there were traces of HEU on the records provided along with some aluminum tube samples and that scuppered the talks in 2008.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-21-fg-korea...
What an odd thing to say. Even when there were monolithic governments ruling over certain sphere of influence like the USSR over Eastern Europe, you still had countries break ranks like Yugoslavia and Romania. A single unified government does not mean that individual actors do not know and use their own leverage to advance their own interests.
North Korea is independent for a variety of reasons, and it's not clear that a pro-US North Korea is an all-around win with no downsides for the US. I think both the US and China like having buffer states to avoid flashpoints for war.
Anyhow, point being - you're not going to get anything like that in most countries. Iran should make that clear enough. North Korea is orders of magnitude stronger than Iran, and Iran is already basically unbeatable simply because they were prepared for a decapitation strike which is pretty much our only card - Americans would never tolerate a real ground war which would entail hundreds of thousands dying. And this is all just ignoring the fact that North Korea also has nuclear weapons.
Snark aside, the real answer is that in the past it was infeasible and undesirable due to the geopolitical situation with China and the USSR. Any major operation there would have been a Cuban missile crisis level provocation. After North Korea successfully built nuclear weapons, any sort of regime change games like the US has done in other countries became totally out of the question. There may have been a brief window in the 1990s where it would have been possible, but it still would likely have resulted in mass civilian casualties (look at where Seoul is on a map).
The only "good" realistic scenario for North Korea in the next 20 years is that they gradually reform their system akin to what China did in the late 70s, early 80s.
Artillery aimed at Seoul: https://atlasinstitute.org/seouls-48-hour-nightmare-from-nor...
Nuclear weapons that can hit Japan (and US bases in Japan): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea_and_weapons_of_mas...
Plus, the quiet part that nobody ever says is neither China or South Korea actually wants to reintegrate a thoroughly brainwashed population. It would be the worst refugee crisis ever by at least an order of magnitude.
German reintegration was difficult enough, reintegrating Korea would be much harder