North Korea News Podcast by NK News

North Korea warned last week that it will shoot down U.S. reconnaissance planes that enter its exclusive economic zone, and those may not be empty threats, history shows. NK News analyst James Fretwell discusses when North Korea shot down a U.S. reconnaissance plane in April 1969 and how the U.S. responded, including by considering nuclear strikes. Also, an American soldier dashed across the inter...

North Korea threatened to shoot down U.S. spy planes that it said “violated” its exclusive economic zone this week. But South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff denied the claims, stating the U.S. reconnaissance flights were “standard” and did not intrude on the North’s territory. NK News data correspondent Anton Sokolin discusses the North’s threats and Kim Yo Jong’s choice of words in her statements...

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol announced his nominee for unification minister last week, but his pick for the role overseeing inter-Korean exchanges — the “new right” professor Kim Yung-ho — has proven controversial for his past comments calling for regime change and repeatedly predicting North Korea’s collapse. NK News correspondent Shreyas Reddy discusses the nomination and what it means f...

The Wagner Group’s brief rebellion rocked Russia over the weekend — and left analysts scratching their heads about what it was all about. But will the aborted uprising impact North Korea’s cooperation with Russia, and should Kim Jong Un himself start worrying about such a military coup?  NK News analytic correspondent Colin Zwirko discusses the implications of the uprising for the DPRK, as well as...

North Korea dramatically destroyed an inter-Korean liaison office near the border in anger over ROK activists’ leafleting in 2020, and now three years later, Seoul wants Pyongyang to pay, suing the North in an effort to recoup construction costs for the building.  Jeongmin Kim (@jeongminnkim), lead correspondent at NK News and editorial director at Korea Pro, discusses the Yoon administration’s no...

North Korea’s borders have been closed for more than three years, but that likely hasn’t stopped China from rounding up defectors and detaining them for eventual repatriation back to the DPRK. New NK Pro analysis reveals that China has expanded prisons known to house defectors right near the border. Ifang Bremer (@IfangBremer) shares his investigation into these prisons, the rigorous interrogation...

The last several weeks have seen major developments on the Korean Peninsula, most notably North Korea’s botched satellite launch that triggered “wartime alert” warnings in South Korea. A historic series of meetings between ROK and Japanese leaders pushed forward efforts to repair ties. And the U.S. and ROK conducted their “largest-ever” live-fire drills. NK News lead correspondent Jeongmin Kim (@j...

Seoul residents awoke to the sound of evacuation sirens and shrill emergency text alerts on Wednesday, after North Korea launched a military spy satellite that ultimately failed. The DPRK has expressed interest in sending its athletes to international competitions, but has been sending mixed signals about easing pandemic border controls. Scholar Dafna Zur also joins the podcast to discuss her rese...

The late 2000s and early 2010s saw a rapid deterioration in inter-Korean ties. The six-party talks broke down, North Korea conducted its second nuclear test and dozens of sailors and South Korean civilians died in two separate DPRK attacks in 2010. Ambassador Kathleen Stephens led the U.S. Embassy in Seoul from 2008 to 2011 and played a leading role in navigating the U.S.-ROK alliance through this...

North Koreans are subjected to some of the worst human rights abuses on Earth, living under a state that refuses to cooperate with the U.N. and other watchdogs and does whatever it takes to keep the Kim dynasty in power. But Joanna Hosaniak of the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights says that regime change is not necessarily the answer. Instead, she argues that the international commu...

Pyongyang failed to achieve its dream of unifying the Korean Peninsula under the banner of the Kim regime during the Korean War, but that may not mean it has abandoned the goal. Andrei Lankov, a professor at Seoul’s Kookmin University, argues that Pyongyang made unification a long-term goal to orient national ideology and justify military spending. And this week, he joins the podcast to discuss wh...

From the outside, it appears the Kim Jong Un regime is no closer to giving up its nuclear weapons than it was a decade ago. State media frequently trumpets the newest nuclear strategy or delivery vehicle, and the leader himself said he will never again entertain denuclearization talks. But Taeho Uhm, a director at the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, sees a country struggling with its cho...

U.S. President Joe Biden and his South Korean counterpart Yoon Suk-yeol reached a series of agreements during their summit on Wednesday, creating a new nuclear consultation group to “manage” North Korean threats and pledging to “further enhance the visibility” of U.S. strategic assets on the peninsula. But reading between the lines of the summit result — which included a joint declaration, fact sh...

As a three-star Air Force general, Dan Leaf trained to carry out nuclear strikes and vaporize targets without hesitation. But after a more than 30-year career, including tours on the Korean Peninsula, the self-described “nuclear warrior” came to believe that what the U.S. was doing wasn’t working to reduce tensions with the DPRK. The retired general now believes that a permanent peace treaty with...

Eunju Kim was a victim of human trafficking after she fled North Korea, spending three years in China in the house of a man who purchased her and her sister. Then, in the middle of the night, police stormed into the residence and took the girls into custody before forcibly repatriating them back to North Korea. When Eunju crossed the border again, she found that she had been erased: The local DPRK...

North Korea fired nearly 20 missiles across more than a half-dozen launch events in March, framing the tests and drills as responses to large-scale U.S.-ROK springtime exercises. But now that the calendar has turned to April, even bigger developments could be on the horizon. The DPRK will mark a number of important holidays this month, including the birth anniversary of Kim Il Sung and the foundin...

Mount Paektu, the highest mountain on the Korean Peninsula, holds a special place in North Korea. Not only did Kim Il Sung — the country’s first leader — based his anti-Japanese guerrilla campaign there, Kim Jong Il — his son and the country’s second leader — was born on the mountain, according to the DPRK’s dubious official history. Mount Paektu is also considered the birthplace of Dangun, the my...

Few populations in the world need more help than North Koreans. Chronic food insecurity, poor sanitation and hygiene practices, inadequate infrastructure and energy shorts affect millions in the country, even in the relatively well-off capital. These issues have compounded over the last three years due to the regime’s ultra-strict pandemic controls. Very little food, health and other aid have reac...

When the U.S. dropped Little Boy and Fat Man on Japan in 1945, it killed or injured tens of thousands of ethnic Koreans working — often against their will — at munitions and other factories in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tokyo has provided support for Japanese victims, but the situation has been entirely different for Koreans. And as Lauren Richardson of the Australian National University explains, de...

The Joint Security Area on the inter-Korean border used to be a popular tourist destination, a place where North and South Korean soldiers stare each other down and visitors can actually step over the Military Demarcation Line within the confines of the famous blue buildings. But since the start of COVID-19, the U.N. Command overseeing the area has prohibited most visits. Recently, however, member...

For decades, North Korea has stressed the virtues of self-reliance, eschewing more robust ties with the outside world in favor of greater autonomy, even at significant cost to its economy. Founding leader Kim Il Sung championed this Korean-style autarky under the name Juche, and this ideology of self-reliance and national sovereignty found a receptive audience in some parts of the world, in partic...

North Korea has refused nearly all diplomatic outreach since mid-2019, choosing instead to go full bore into weapons development while pledging never again to participate in denuclearization talks. But for Keith Luse of the National Committee on North Korea, this lack of engagement stems at least partly from Washington’s own policy oscillations. Luse joins the NK News podcast to discuss how to eng...

In the early 2000s, no one outside North Korea was quite sure about the extent of the country’s nuclear program, whether it had plutonium for an atomic bomb and if then-leader Kim Jong Il was willing to risk a nuclear test. That changed in 2004, when North Korea invited Siegfried Hecker, longtime chief of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, to tour its Yongbyon Nuclear Research Cente...

When North Korea invaded the South in 1950, it triggered a brutal three-year war that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions.  But David Cheng Chang argues that the Korean War was in fact two separate conflicts. The first ended in 1951, when both the North and South Korean front lines became more or less static. The second and far less studied conflict ran from 1951 to the armistice a...

North Korea celebrated the 75th anniversary of its army on Wednesday, revealing a new solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile and showing off more long-range missiles than ever before at a single event. Kim Jong Un's young daughter was also front and center during the event and even accompanied her father to a pre-parade banquet. But the parade was also notable for what it lacked, with no Ki...