Recently, a paper of mine was included in an edited volume based on a 2022 conference at KIMEP University.
My contribution, chapter 5, examined at how North Korean novels and other state literature depict nuclear technology. One of the questions I was particularly keen to investigate was cultural depictions of nuclear radiation. Western popular culture provides such a lavish cornucopia of cultural references associated with radiation, from Godzilla to Spiderman, not to mention real-life accounts of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc. With such cultural exposure, we may erroneously assume that everyone feels the same instinctive horror associated with the word "nuclear."
In North Korean historical novels, there is a fair amount of coverage of the geopolitics of the Hiroshima bombing, the subsequent nuclear tests by the USSR and China, the NPT and the various test ban treaties, and lots of allusions to a "sea of fire." But I found very little description of what nuclear radiation actually does to human bodies, and nothing about radioactive fallout, keloids, cancers, and other long-term health and environmental effects. And of course, nothing about the lasting hazards at sites of nuclear testing or nuclear reactor accidents.
Searching my database of North Korean literature (currently comprising 70 major historical novels and thousands of shorter stories, essays and poems), I was able to find eight entries that mention radiation [search terms: 방사선, 방사능, 방사성]:
The novel 대박산마루 (2010) by Song Sang Won mentions radiocarbon [방사선탄소] amidst a detailed technical discussion of carbon dating procedures performed on remains found in Tangun's tomb.
The novel 동해천리 (1996) by Paek Nam Nyong mentions radium in a brief discussion of Marie Curie's life; Paek seems to have a special fascination with Curie and mentions her in several novels.
The novel 총검을 들고 (2002) depicts the US military dropping irradiated foodstuffs on NK during the 1990s famine, along with an irradiated baby dropped by parachute (a nefarious tactic "preying on the compassion" of North Koreans "who will naturally run to help the baby and thus be poisoned"). Later in this same novel there is an intriguing depiction of soldiers heroically sacrificing themselves to finish constructing a tunnel at Kumgangsan Dam after a cave-in causes a radioactive gas leak - presumably radon. A "chemicals car" [화학차] is sent in to test the air and finds radiation "above the danger level," at which point Kim Jong Il personally supplies the workers with special gas suits [특수방독복] and gas masks [방독면], but several men are already fatally exposed.
The story "푸른 강산" (2014), Paek Bo Hŭm's contribution to the first anthology of stories featuring new leader Kim Jong Un, focuses on environmental issues, chiefly the effort to restore North Korea's depleted forests. Early on it points the finger at global capitalism: "Botanists of the world! Never forget that the US imperialists, who killed countless lives with atomic bombs and polluted the earth's air with radioactive poisons [방사능독해물], also sprayed chemicals that shriveled the trees in jungles during the Vietnam War. Even now, grass does not grow there." The reference to "radioactive poisons" in the air may be a reference to the "black rain" phenomenon immediately after the bombings, or it could perhaps be a reference to atmospheric radiation from the Bikini atoll tests, but this is unclear.
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| KJU inspecting an alleged h-bomb (src: The New York Times) |
At that moment, the NDC members all held their breath, recalling the serious implication of the simple term "accident." If the reactor core is not replaced, radiation will be emitted, potentially repeating the Chernobyl disaster which once shook Europe, and the nuclear power industry built by our own self-reliance could be blown into the sky overnight.
This is the only literary reference I could find explicitly associating the idea of harmful radiation with a nuclear reactor. It probably should be noted that the above comes nowhere close to describing the actual cause of the Chernobyl disaster. More to the point, though, the passage does not explore the more serious peninsula-wide environmental and health problems that would inevitably result from such a disaster, but only the damage to North Korea's nuclear power industry.
선생님 믿으십시오, a short story by Ri Myŏng Hyŏn from Chosun Munhak in March 2014, mentions radiation in discussing mutations of experimental seedlings in plant genetics research [식물육종학].
그대의 심장, a 실화 ("true anecdote") that appeared in Choson Munhak May 2006, very briefly mentions radiation therapy as effective in relieving stress caused by computer use.
The novel Ryŏksa ŭi Taeha makes brief mention of the "Atom Bomb Disease" [원폭증] suffered by the victims of Hiroshima, but does not specifically reference radiation as the cause and thus did not pop up in my search. This occurs during a rumination by Moon Sung-kyu (pseudonym for Kang Sok-ju) on the stakes of the nuclear issue. Through his thoughts, we get an unusually vivid description of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing:
August 6th, 1945, 8:15 am; An atomic bomb of unprecedented destructive and lethal power exploded in Hiroshima. The world soon learned of the horrors of that terrible day.What happened in that city? .. At first the survivors could not properly tell the whole story of what had happened. Those who could have done so were all dead. For the living, their senses were initially dulled by shock, fear, death, and devastation; some said “There was a huge flash of light,” or “my eyes were dazzled,” or “a sudden yellow light flashed and seemed to shatter everything.”Anyway, some sort of detonation happened that flashed in mid-air. The next instant, the whole city shook as if an earthquake struck, trembling and undulating in a roar of thunder. At the same time an impossible dusk settled over the city that soon turned to complete darkness. A strangely electric gas permeated the air, and there was a foul odor. No one knew yet that it was the smell of death.Some days later, before the funeral bells had even ceased, reports confirmed 100,000 dead or missing and 50,000 injured, out of a total city population of 200,000 at the time of the explosion. But even this terrible disaster was still only the beginning. Tens of thousands of people who contracted “atomic bomb syndrome” [원폭증] died one after another, beginning just days or a few weeks later. This road of death continued for many years.
The 2017 novel Boru includes an evocative moment in which MacArthur, from his GHQ office, looks out over the gloomy streets of postwar Tokyo: "The fog, brought on by atmospheric flow and temperature difference, aroused uneasy thoughts of the atomic dust flowing over from Hiroshima and Nagasaki" [히로시마와 나가사끼에서 실려온 원자먼지가 아닌가싶은 께름함]. Here again, the text avoids using the term "radiation" or anything that might be associated with nuclear power.
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| The Fukushima #1 reactor explosion was caused by a power supply failure (Src: PolarJournal) |
Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn't. But in my past research on atom bomb history, one of the most chilling moments for me was reading the declassified strategic discussions prior to the Hiroshima bombing and realizing how little the US military seemed to comprehend the terrifying elemental forces they were about to unleash. In 1945, with no cultural framing, most of them seemed to envision the A-bomb as just a conventional bomb on a larger scale. They talked only in terms of blast radius and equivalent tons of TNT, with not a word about fallout or radioactive decay rates.
In the US, growing awareness of the dangers of nuclear radiation, painfully gained through a too-long list of accidents and exposures, eventually led the public to demand a moratorium on nuclear testing and heavy regulation of the nuclear power industry - and our test sites, like the Soviet Union's, were all far out in the unpopulated hinterland or obscure Pacific atolls (which still had horrific consequences for people hundreds of kilometers downwind). North Korea has no choice but to test and store its bombs within its own small territory, a few hundred kilometers from its capital city.
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| The evacuated atolls of Rongelap and Rongerik, 160 and 240 km from ground zero respectively, were exposed to airborne radioactive fallout from American h-bomb tests in 1954. The native population briefly returned in 1957 but had to be re-evacuated after suffering extremely high rates of stillbirths and cancers. The atolls remain uninhabited today. |
Not even the US mainland population has been entirely safe. The American public has only recently come to learn just how close to disaster we came in several instances during the Cold War, e.g. the Arkansas Titan II missile accident and the Goldsboro B-52 crash. If all of the US military's vaunted redundancies and safety protocols could prove so inadequate, what hope is there for North Korea? And if a fully modern facility like Fukushima Dai-ichi could be undone by an unforeseen flaw in the backup power generator system, what are the odds of a plant operating safely in North Korea, where the basic civilian power supply is spotty even on a good day?
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| My former foster cat Mametaro, shortly after he was rescued from the Fukushima exclusion zone in 2019. Mametaro is now fat and happy and living his best life in Tokyo. |
