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Volume 94 – No. 4

KIM JONG UN AND THE BOMB: Survival and Deterrence in North Korea | By Ankit Panda

 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. xv, 393 pp. US$27.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-006036-7.


As the North Korean state made remarkable leaps to its nuclear and missile capabilities under the leadership of Kim Jong-un, Ankit Panda, a journalist and editor at The Diplomat, based in New York, was following the developments in real time. Working independently and at times in concert with think tanks like the Middlebury Institute in Monterrey, Panda documented North Korea’s technological progress and published scoops on alleged sites of nuclear enrichment at Kangson, outside of Pyongyang (108). His reporting scrutinized North Korean state photographs and television segments frame-by-frame, but it also relied on old-fashioned leaks from US intelligence agencies, à la David Sanger’s work for the New York Times. The endnotes are studded with references to interviews with unnamed US intelligence officials (“who were not authorized to share what they did” [x]), and the odd cryptic annotation that implies that the author had access to or was appraised of on-the-ground espionage materials (277, 345).

Kim Jong Un and the Bomb is an engaging and comprehensive brief on North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities, and it represents an important update to the literature. Panda’s book provides heft to the individual role of Kim Jong-un as explored in biographies by Anna Fifield and Jung Pak, and shows potential to speak to scholars of authoritarianism or state legitimacy in North Korea. Readers will occasionally need to work through a thicket of acronyms and missile design titles (summarized in a tidy five-page appendix), but this book is far more than just the prose equivalent of a high-grade satellite photograph. The writing walks a line between wonky and colloquial, with approachable asides like “it is far easier to send things into space—whether nuclear missiles or humans—than to safely return them” (219). In some cases it might be profitably paired in the classroom with The 2020 Commission, Jeffrey Lewis’ ironic and counterfactual exploration of the strategic and human consequences that a “limited” nuclear war with North Korea would actually entail.

The book’s chapter design is admirable and clean, sequencing through an overview of the history of Kim Jong-un’s time in power, a short history of North Korea’s nuclear development, and notes and asides on principles of nuclear deterrence for the lay person. Chapter 4, “Building the Bomb,” covers the nuclear enrichment site at Yongbyon, and gives a brief history of North Korea’s six nuclear tests to date; this is useful stuff to review in capsule, particularly for specialists who still feel blitzed by the last half-decade of developments. This is followed by treatment of North Korea’s short-range missile capabilities (“ballistic missiles [were] the hilt of Kim’s ‘treasured sword,’” 69), and a useful focused chapter on the capacity and significance of North Korea’s submarine launch efforts.

The last half of the book covers the role of Guam as an announced target, North Korea’s ICBM capacity, and the vexing question of command and control over North Korea’s nuclear arsenal (readers may recall the Trump Twitter-KCNA spat from January 2018 over “whose button is bigger”). Panda maintains discipline—the book largely avoids the vortex of Trumpism and US government interagency frictions exacerbated thereby. Swaggering subplotters John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are confined to “The Arsonist and the Firefighter” chapter, a short history of the Trump-Kim Jong-un talks. The book speaks clearly to the anxieties which North Korea was unleashing among the US national security apparatus during the Trump era, and questions about US military responses (292–293) remain salient.

The text leaves several loops open, not least of which is whether the cumulative $67 billion the US has spent on a specific type of missile defence (294) has had any purpose at all. Budgetary pressures on Kim Jong-un, however, get short shrift in the book; while kit rather than cost is Panda’s main object, it might have been useful to see something like a ballpark figure (annual or cumulative) on the cost of these programs to or within the North Korean economy. Other areas needing further study include Kim Jong-un’s cohort of nuclear scientists, including their links to Chinese training, information, and methods, and to what extent Kim has wooed and supplied this group even while spurring them on to work overdrive. (Leiden University’s Koen de Ceuster and his studies of North Korean artists might prove a useful model here.) North Korea’s own perceptions of US assessments might also bear consideration—a topic covered in part by the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos in his September 2017 junket to Pyongyang. Finally, the question of the relationship between an extended nuclear deterrent and the possibility of what Panda calls “greater conventional adventurism” (92) might be teased out further. On the whole, this book merits reading in detail by North Korea analysts and defence professionals, and it serves as an excellent reference text for those with casual to obsessive interests in North Korea generally.


Adam Cathcart

University of Leeds, Leeds    


Last Revised: February 28, 2022
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