North Korea News Podcast by NK News

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 government assumed she had starved to death, and deleted her from the citizens' registry. 

A ghost in her hometown, she embarked on a yearslong journey that ultimately ended up with her in South Korea.

Now Eunju works for Freedom Speakers International (FSI), helping empower North Korean refugees, especially women, by teaching them the communication tools critical for life in modern South Korean society.

Eunju and FSI co-founder Eunkoo Lee join the NK News podcast to discuss Eunju’s incredible journey out of North Korea, the importance of English language for defectors, how North Korean refugees overcome prejudice and more. 

Eunju Kim is a North Korea refugee communication specialist at FSI and co-author of “A Thousand Miles to Freedom.” Eunkoo Lee is co-founder and co-president at FSI and an expert and advocate for North Korean human rights and refugees.

About the podcast: The North Korea News Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Jacco Zwetsloot (@JaccoZed) exclusively for NK News, covering all things DPRK — from news to extended interviews with leading experts and analysts in the field, along with insight from our very own journalists.

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 founding of the national military. And North Korea has indicated that it will complete preparations for a satellite launch this month, while South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol is scheduled to make a state visit to the U.S. that Pyongyang will closely monitor. 

This week, NK News founder Chad O'Carroll and analyst James Fretwell join the podcast to discuss the March that was and prospects for the month ahead — from North Korea’s new undersea “nuclear attack drone” and surprise border reopening to ongoing military drills in South Korea and the possibility of more long-range missile testing.

About the podcast: The North Korea News Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Jacco Zwetsloot (@JaccoZed) exclusively for NK News, covering all things DPRK — from news to extended interviews with leading experts and analysts in the field, along with insight from our very own journalists.

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 mythical founder of Korea’s first kingdom. Amid the inter-Korean rapprochement of 2018, North and South Korean leaders Kim Jong Un and Moon Jae-in famously held hands and took photos atop the mountain.

It’s also an active volcano. Just over 1,000 years ago, Mount Paektu erupted on a scale that ranks among the largest in recorded human history.

James Hammond of Birkbeck, University of London is the director of the Mount Paektu Research Centre. Hammond joins the NK News Podcast to talk about his interest in the mountain, collaboration with North Korean scientists, how sanctions affect what research equipment you can bring into the DPRK and much more.

About the podcast: The North Korea News Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Jacco Zwetsloot (@JaccoZed) exclusively for NK News, covering all things DPRK — from news to extended interviews with leading experts and analysts in the field, along with insight from our very own journalists.

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 reached the country since, and there are no international aid workers left to ensure that North Korea’s most vulnerable are receiving what goods have trickled in.

Few are more familiar with these challenges than Jerome Sauvage, who led U.N. humanitarian efforts in North Korea during Kim Jong Un’s first years in power. 

Sauvage joins the NK News Podcast to talk about his work in the country and how the DPRK changed during his time there. He also discusses the different approaches of U.N. aid agencies, the unique challenges facing the DPRK agriculture sector, underreported health issues killing North Korean children, the humanitarian impact of sanctions and more.

Jerome Sauvage is an international relations consultant with extensive experience in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. As U.N. Coordinator in North Korea from 2009 to 2013, Jérome Sauvage led the U.N. in providing emergency and humanitarian support to the population, represented the U.N. at bilateral and multilateral levels, negotiated the U.N.’s operating conditions in the country and led fundraising efforts in support of humanitarian activities. 

About the podcast: The North Korea News Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Jacco Zwetsloot (@JaccoZed) exclusively for NK News, covering all things DPRK — from news to extended interviews with leading experts and analysts in the field, along with insight from our very own journalists.

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, decades of appeals from both North and South Korea have not yielded the same awareness or support.

This week, Richardson joins the NK News podcast to discuss how the politics of victimhood have evolved over the decades since WWII, how North Korea has also co-opted the discourse over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for its own ideological purposes and how the DPRK medical system responds to radiation treatment for atomic bomb victims.

Lauren Richardson (@Lauren_ANU) is a lecturer in the Department of International Relations at Australian National University. Read her paper “The Forgotten Victims of the Atomic Bomb: North Korean Pipokja and the Politics of Victimhood in Japan-DPRK Relations” by clicking here.

About the podcast: The North Korea News Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Jacco Zwetsloot (@JaccoZed) exclusively for NK News, covering all things DPRK — from news to extended interviews with leading experts and analysts in the field, along with insight from our very own journalists.

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, members of the NK News team joined other media for a special tour of Panmunjom on the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), recording an exclusive podcast from what past U.S. presidents have called “freedom’s frontier.”

This week, host Jacco Zwetsloot (@JaccoZed) and NK News CEO Chad O’Carroll (@chadocl) go inside the Joint Security Area to investigate reports of mass starvation in North Korea, how communications pass between the two sides, when the DPRK does (and doesn’t) answer the phone and what’s changed during the pandemic.

You can read more about what NK News learned during the JSA visit in the following article: "No signs of death and starvation at inter-Korean border, UNC officials say."

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About the podcast: The North Korea News Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Jacco Zwetsloot exclusively for NK News, covering all things DPRK — from news to extended interviews with leading experts and analysts in the field, along with insight from our very own journalists.

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 particular among member states of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Alhassan Mamman Muhammad is one of those who became a believer in North Korea’s state ideology. The leader of a Nigerian committee promoting Juche, he joins the NK News podcast to discuss why he has embraced the DPRK’s political ideals, how the Non-Aligned Movement inspired him and others to embrace Juche, how this relates to the legacies of colonialism on the African continent and more.

 Muhammad is chairman of the Nigerian National Committee on the Study of Juche Idea and a professor at the University of Abuja in Nigeria.

About the podcast: The North Korea News Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Jacco Zwetsloot (@JaccoZed) exclusively for NK News, covering all things DPRK — from news to extended interviews with leading experts and analysts in the field, along with insight from our very own journalists.

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 engage the DPRK across diverse issues, from humanitarianism to nuclear weapons. He talks about how lack of information on the outside world hinders North Korea’s ability to maximize the best outcomes for itself, why he thinks Kim Jong Un's economic ambitions are real and should give us hope for future prospects of international cooperation, his multiple visits to Pyongyang and more.

Keith Luse is the executive director of the National Committee on North Korea (@NCNKorea). He has also served as senior Asia policy adviser at the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations committee. 

About the podcast: The North Korea News Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Jacco Zwetsloot (@JaccoZed) exclusively for NK News, covering all things DPRK — from news to extended interviews with leading experts and analysts in the field, along with insight from our very own journalists.

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 Center. Hecker found a nascent but highly advanced nuclear program, driven by talented scientists who acutely understood the technological processes behind plutonium reprocessing.

This week, Hecker joins the NK News podcast to talk about his visits to Yongbyon and his new book exploring the DPRK’s nuclear program. He explains why North Korea might prefer plutonium bombs to uranium ones, how many bombs the DPRK likely possesses and why he believes the deal put on the table at the U.S.-DPRK summit in Hanoi was the best chance to stop North Korea’s nuclear program in decades.

Dr. Siegfried Hecker (@SiegfriedHecker) was the fifth director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the premier U.S. nuclear research facility. He is also a senior fellow and professor emeritus at Stanford University. His new book “Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program” is now available.

About the podcast: The North Korea News Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Jacco Zwetsloot (@JaccoZed) exclusively for NK News, covering all things DPRK — from news to extended interviews with leading experts and analysts in the field, along with insight from our very own journalists.

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 agreement in 1953, focusing primarily on the fate of prisoners of war (POW) held in both communist and allied camps.

Chang joins the NK News podcast to discuss his perspective on the war, the staggering number of Chinese volunteer army personnel that fought on North Korea’s side, why it insisted POWs be returned to their home countries, brainwashing of prisoners by both U.S. and communist forces and more. 

David Cheng Chang is associate professor of history at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His book “The Hijacked War: The Story of Chinese POWs in the Korean War” was published in Jan. 2020, and you can find him on Twitter @DavidChangCheng. 

Watch David’s interview with Yang Shuzhi (楊樹芝) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUj3pfqcGY8

About the podcast: The North Korea News Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Jacco Zwetsloot (@JaccoZed) exclusively for NK News, covering all things DPRK — from news to extended interviews with leading experts and analysts in the field, along with insight from our very own journalists.