In North Korea’s heavily militarized society, even learning the periodic table can be done at the barrel of a gun.
“The young students enjoy it,” said the assistant, picking up a model rifle and aiming it at the familiar table of elements projected on a screen about 10 feet away.
A hit on Po brings up an explanation of Polonium — its discovery, properties and uses.
Photo: AFP/Ed Jones
The shooting range is one of a number of teaching aids housed in the Science and Technology Center, a vast complex built in the shape of an atom on a river islet in Pyongyang.
Opened earlier this year, the center shares characteristics common to other grandiose projects constructed in the showcase capital under the direct orders of supreme leader Kim Jong-un, using scarce money and resources siphoned from North Korea’s threadbare economy.
It was built at lightning speed — just over 10 months using soldier labor — looks impressive, and is almost eerily empty.
Photo: AFP/Ed Jones
The complex reportedly receives several thousand visitors a day, but on a recent Saturday afternoon, only a few dozen of the more than 3,000 computer console study stations were occupied — several of those by members of staff.
Like other prestige projects, the center is as much a symbol of intent as anything else.
WEALTH AND POWER
In numerous speeches and statements, including a keynote address to a rare party congress in May, Kim has put science and technology front and center of the effort to build a “rich and powerful fatherland.”
The power element is firmly focused on national defense, and a science-based weapons system ranging from cyber warfare to a sophisticated nuclear deterrent.
The country’s nuclear and missile scientists are treated as national heroes, feted with personal congratulations from the top leadership and rewarded with modern high-rise apartments in Pyongyang and multiple other benefits for themselves and their families.
The Sci-Tech Center’s main structure is built around a large mock-up of the North’s Unha 3 rocket — a satellite launcher seen as a prototype for an eventual inter-continental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the mainland United States.
Pyongyang insists the rocket’s uses are purely scientific and space-based.
On the cyber warfare front, the North has already proved its technical capabilities, launching a damaging attack on South Korean banks and broadcasters in 2013 and blamed by Washington for an audacious hacking assault on Sony Pictures the following year.
‘WORLD-CLASS’ CYBER WARRIORS
In testimony to the US Senate Armed Services Committee in April, the newly-appointed commander of US forces in South Korea, General Vincent Brooks, said the North’s elite cyber units “are among the best in the world and the best organized.”
This in a country where access to the full internet is the privilege of an elite few.
The Sci-Tech complex’s computer consoles are segregated, with those in the main hall only capable of accessing a home-page hosted on an internal server with a limited menu of subjects ranging from children’ cartoons to educational material.
Users over the age of 17 and with the required permission, can surf the North’s tightly-controlled, closed-network intranet system, allowing access to state media and some officially approved sites.
There are also links to North Korean university e-libraries and large wall posters boast — or at least suggest — the availability of well-known Western scientific databases like Elsevier and Springer.
The intranet runs on an indigenously developed Linux-based operating system, Red Star.
Niklaus Scheiss and Florian Grunow, two German researchers who downloaded and conducted an exhaustive analysis of Red Star, described it as the “wet dream of a surveillance state.”
KEEPING TABS
The system notes and reacts to any attempt to tinker with its core functions and creates tabs, or “watermarks,” on the files of a computer or any USB stick connected to it.
The purpose, Scheiss and Grunow told a conference in Hamburg last year, is to track any user who created, possessed or opened any particular file.
It’s a powerful tool in a country where unauthorized material, including foreign films, news articles or music are often shared illicitly using USB sticks or other data cards.
Visitors to the Sci-Tech center are issued temporary ID cards that allocate and log them in and out of a specific console.
“It’s a good place to study and I work here during my lunch breaks,” said Ri Yong-hwa, a college student with a part-time job at the center.
“I wanted to put into action our Dear Leader’s words to place our country at the forefront of science and technology,” Ri told AFP.
Ordinary North Koreans usually express only officially-sanctioned views when questioned by foreign news organizations.
One of the biggest sore spots in Taiwan’s historical friendship with the US came in 1979 when US president Jimmy Carter broke off formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan’s Republic of China (ROC) government so that the US could establish relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Taiwan’s derecognition came purely at China’s insistence, and the US took the deal. Retired American diplomat John Tkacik, who for almost decade surrounding that schism, from 1974 to 1982, worked in embassies in Taipei and Beijing and at the Taiwan Desk in Washington DC, recently argued in the Taipei Times that “President Carter’s derecognition
JUNE 30 to JULY 6 After being routed by the Japanese in the bloody battle of Baguashan (八卦山), Hsu Hsiang (徐驤) and a handful of surviving Hakka fighters sped toward Tainan. There, he would meet with Liu Yung-fu (劉永福), leader of the Black Flag Army who had assumed control of the resisting Republic of Formosa after its president and vice-president fled to China. Hsu, who had been fighting non-stop for over two months from Taoyuan to Changhua, was reportedly injured and exhausted. As the story goes, Liu advised that Hsu take shelter in China to recover and regroup, but Hsu steadfastly
You can tell a lot about a generation from the contents of their cool box: nowadays the barbecue ice bucket is likely to be filled with hard seltzers, non-alcoholic beers and fluorescent BuzzBallz — a particular favorite among Gen Z. Two decades ago, it was WKD, Bacardi Breezers and the odd Smirnoff Ice bobbing in a puddle of melted ice. And while nostalgia may have brought back some alcopops, the new wave of ready-to-drink (RTD) options look and taste noticeably different. It is not just the drinks that have changed, but drinking habits too, driven in part by more health-conscious consumers and
On Sunday, President William Lai (賴清德) delivered a strategically brilliant speech. It was the first of his “Ten Lectures on National Unity,” (團結國家十講) focusing on the topic of “nation.” Though it has been eclipsed — much to the relief of the opposing Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) — by an ill-advised statement in the second speech of the series, the days following Lai’s first speech were illuminating on many fronts, both domestic and internationally, in highlighting the multi-layered success of Lai’s strategic move. “OF COURSE TAIWAN IS A COUNTRY” Never before has a Taiwanese president devoted an entire speech to
RSS