August 7, 2001	atimes.com

The Koreas PYONGYANG WATCH Further reading for juche junkies By Aidan Foster-Carter An earlier column Juche on the beach: summer reading on North Korea, (Jul 20) commended half a dozen key volumes on North Korea (and Korea more generally) for any readers inspired to probe this uniquely peculiar land in more depth. But the old socialist in me - still there, somewhere - jibs at being quite so selective; especially now that, for the first time, there's such a wealth of fine and scholarly work available that deserves a wider audience. So here is a further batch. As before, most are recent paperbacks, which means excluding some fine but pricey monographs. To save space, I omit most publishing details, which should be easy to find from any online bookstore. Say what you will about the fetid world within the Beltway, but some of the best work on North Korea these days comes out of Washington think tanks. My earlier article mentioned Avoiding the Apocalypse by Marcus Noland of the Institute for International Economics (IE). Worth a look too is another IIE volume edited by Noland, Economic Integration of the Korean Peninsula, which examines a range of scenarios for North Korea and Korea overall. Scenarios are also the subject of Preparing for Korean Unification by Jonathan Pollack and Chung Min Lee, a slim but punchy volume from Rand for the US Army; and of Managing Change on the Korean Peninsula, by a Council for Foreign Relations ongoing task force. Still in DC, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) houses Nicholas Eberstadt, whose efforts to get numbers out of North Korea deserve a medal. Possibly not the Order of Kim Il-sung: DPRK statisticians tried to disown data they'd given him in Pyongyang. The Population of North Korea and Korea Approaches Reunification are still available; his latest is The End of North Korea, plus an edited volume on (again) Korean futures. All combine rigorous empirical enquiry with lucid prose and coruscating critique. The AEI also issued one of two books from Washington institutes on the timely topic of DPRK negotiating behavior: Over the Line, by Chuck Downs. Its 350 pages can be summed up in two words: lyin' reds! - with ample evidence over half a century. By contrast, Negotiating on the Edge by Scott Snyder, then of the US Institute of Peace, is more nuanced and recent in focus. The Bushmen should mull both. Of course, the topic of much dialogue with the DPRK has been The Bomb, generating quite a literature on its own. Michael Mazarr's North Korea and the Bomb describes the crisis of the early 1990s. Leon Sigal's Disarming Strangers updates and adds detail, but errs on the doveish side. I've not yet seen a new collection, Solving the North Korean Nuclear Puzzle, edited by David Albright and Kevin O'Neill. Now then. Who really knows about nukes, and all about North Korea, because they founded the place? Da. Ask the Russians. James Clay Moltz and Alexandre Mansourov's collection The North Korean Nuclear Program is wider than its title implies, covering many aspects of the once tight but often tense Moscow-Pyongyang ties. Now all we need is for China to spill the beans too. On wider diplomacy, a useful collection is North Korean Foreign Relations in the Post-Cold War Era, edited by Samuel Kim. On North Korea as such, a fine interpretive study cum political history, by the first Australian diplomat in Pyongyang back in 1975, is Adrian Buzo's The Guerilla Dynasty. Also useful, if less focused being edited collections, are Ilpyong Kim's The Two Koreas in Transition and North Korea After Kim Il Sung (Dae-Sook Suh and Chae-Jin Lee eds). Understanding Regime Dynamics in North Korea, ed Chung-in Moon (Yonsei University Press), is a representative example of the scholarship now being published in Seoul that deserves wider distribution. Complementing these is Roy Richard Grinker's Korea and Its Futures, a psycho-cultural study of how South Koreans think and feel about the North and unification. Older works can be good too. The US Army handbook - did you know they cover the planet? - is still useful, if a bit dated (Andrea Matles Savada ed, North Korea: A Country Study); as is Dae-Sook Suh's classic biography of the man who made it, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader. Also oldish, but only now declassified, is Kim Il-song's North Korea by Helen-Louise Hunter, formerly of the CIA: a fascinating sociological study which really gets under the DPRK's skin. But why was it ever a secret? Then again, after reading The Armed Forces of North Korea by Joseph Bermudez Jr, you may wonder if the CIA - or indeed the DPRK - have any secrets left. Bermudez dissects the KPA with a relentless bombardment of astonishing detail. Battle plans, airstrip maps, command diagrams: it's all here, along with every last piece of ordnance in North Korea (there are four pages of acronyms alone), and who it's pointing at. A long chapter on missiles is especially timely. Real boy's own stuff, and a tour de force. On the wider security background, Conflict in Korea by James Hoare and Susan Pares, is an invaluable encyclopedia, as well as a captivating browse from Abductions to Zhou Enlai. But wait for their next book, in due course. What was that old slogan about the unity of theory and practice? Dr Hoare has just taken up his post as Her Britannic Majesty's charge d'affaires in Pyongyang. Best of British. ((c)2001 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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