 The Global Cyber Threat Environment, Module 13, Understanding the North Korean Mindset. Objectives, once you have completed the readings, lecture, activity, and assessment, you will be able to describe the concept of siege mentality and how this mentality prompted North Korea to develop asymmetric military capabilities, including cyber weapons, articulate how the Korean War and subsequent division of the Korean Peninsula contributed to North Korea's siege mentality. Welcome to Global Cyber Threat Environment, Module 13. The title of this module is Understanding the North Korean Mindset and will be given by our guest lecturer, Dr. Han S. Park. Dr. Park is a retired professor of public and international affairs and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Global Issues, GLOBUS, at the University of Georgia. Dr. Park's areas of specialty include political development, globalization, and comparative politics with an emphasis on East Asian studies. Among his numerous publications are North Korea, the politics of unconventional wisdom and human needs, and political development. He has been deeply involved in a number of peacemaking initiatives with North Korea. Under his leadership, GLOBUS has hosted several track two seminars with participants from North Korea, South Korea, and the United States, most recently in October 2011. Dr. Park was also instrumental in realizing former President Jimmy Carter's trips to Pyongyang in 1994 and 2010, which may well have averted a possible military confrontation between the United States and the DPRK. He has been relentless in his efforts to alleviate the nuclear tension on the Korean Peninsula, making more than 50 trips to North Korea since 1990. His work has been widely praised, and in 2010, Dr. Park received the Gondi King Akita Community Builders Award in recognition for his extraordinary global leadership through nonviolence and reconciliation. Past recipients of this award have included former South African President Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rehman. After the Second World War and ensuing Cold War era, we have had a lot of developments in weaponry and the means of destroying enemies. Now some countries use more heavily non-conventional weapons such as weapons of mass destruction and cyber attack. So I like to use North Korea as an example. What sort of mindset prompted North Korea to turn to this unconventional weaponry? North Korea comes from, in terms of the mindset, from the concept of siege mentality. A siege mentality is one in which the person who has this mentality feels life is threatened, fearful, and surrounded by hostile enemies whose primary goal is to destroy and kill you. So this kind of mindset is called siege mentality. When North Korea comes from that, a siege mentality person will be overly protective, usually weaker country like North Korea. You have to turn to weapons of mass destruction and cyber weaponry. So siege mentality, where does North Korea come from that? You see, Korea, the peninsula itself is a very beautiful piece of land, peninsula and so forth. Long history is filled with Chinese empires attacking and occupying the Korean peninsula and eventually ended up with the colonialization by Japan before the Second World War. So Japan occupied Korea and colonialized Korea. And Japanese colonial policy was very, very aggressive, very inhumane, very disruptive, far more than British and any European, Colombian policies. So there, North Korea and South Korea all together before the division of the country suffered a great deal from Japanese colonialism. Even they are forced to change their names or adopt Japanese names, Japan wanted to have second class citizenry in Koreans and Chinese. So with that, that is the beginning of siege mentality. And then we have the division of the country, forcefully by the United States and Soviet Union to two victors in the Second World War. Half of the Korea 38th parallel above the North became the two-factor colony of the Soviet Union and the South two-factor colony of the United States. The Cold War period, throughout the Cold War period, these two world hegemonic powers manipulated Korea extensively. In the case of North Korea, the Soviet Union could not control the communist bloc that handedly, as the United States did, the free world. So the communist world was divided between Mao Zedong's China and Stalin's Soviet Union. So North Korea was subjected to two-factor colonial policies of these two superpowers in the communist bloc. China policies were pretty exploitive, manipulative. There comes the siege mentality. And then we have the Korean War itself, where some 18 countries got involved, many casualties including many Americans. Millions of Koreans perished. Fifty-some-thousand American soldiers were victimized. So in this situation, Koreans developed a great deal of anxiety and sense of insecurity during the three-year-long Korean War. After the war ended, the hot war ended, we have had a still today, 2018. We still have the Armistice Agreement signed in 1953. So some 60-some years, we have had this unending Korean War, where arms race became the norm. And American troops stationed in South Korea to this state, tens of thousands, today maybe 29,000 ground troops wearing American soldier uniform are serving in South Korea. So this situation, inter-Korea competition became much more security competition. There comes the arms race. The world itself had the arms race during the Cold War era. The Soviet Union and the United States collectively accumulated tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. And in addition to all kinds of conventional weapons that are extremely sophisticated, the world is saturated with weapons, weapons of mass destruction and sophisticated weapons. That's the Cold War. The inter-Korea, the two countries got divided in the meantime, and North Korea representing one and South Korea representing the other. So the Korean Peninsula itself became the hotspot in terms of arms race. And the war has always been a possibility. U.S. South Korean soldiers, they were doing annual joint military exercises. And North Koreans were scared of that. And they're alarmed by the fact that these exercises can evolve into actual attack. When I visited North Korea so many times, when I'm there, when these joint exercises are taking place, then I see the entire country kind of darkened and sirens all over. Nothing is normal. So that prompted the siege mentality I'm referring to here. And then you have South Korea, with the help of United States, has been developing enormously militarily as well as economically, especially economically science and technology. And South Korea has become a model, successful, developing system. Joined the OECD club, actually developed a country that is South Korea. North Korea, because of their nuclear ambition, that continues to be under pressures and sanctions by the United States and the United Nations, unable to cultivate any kind of development, very backward system. That's another source of significant siege mentality. We're dealing with this situation, North Korea, no economic base, the enemy across the border, South Korea, aided by the United States, developing greatly. So the siege mentality became a permanent, arrested mentality. So here North Korea had to do something. So what they did was making nuclear bomb. They successfully did that. They lasted many decades. They developed with their indigenous technology and science and material. They are manufacturing, they have manufactured dozens of nuclear weapons. They have scientific development reaching the point where they made by themselves ICBM, intercontinental ballistic missiles. So they're claiming that they have the ability to attack the United States with the nuclear weapons. They believe that they have that ability. The suspicion that North Korea might have that ability is widespread in the United States too. So Americans have become more motivated to annihilate North Korea, to destroy the country and make the country perish from the face of this world. So here North Korea's anxiety, that mentality got heightened and they're making not only nuclear weapons but cyber instruments. That's where we are. So we have to know where the mindset, all policies are made by mindset. We have to understand, we have to study and we have to realize what kind of mindset North Korea is coming from, what kind of environment, historical context may have prompted that mindset. Quiz question one, true or false. North Korea developed a siege mentality as a result of being surrounded by aggressive neighboring countries like China and Japan. A, true, B, false. The answer is A, true. Quiz question two, true or false. Most geopolitical experts agree that the presence of U.S. military forces in South Korea has significantly contributed to the underdevelopment of its economy. A, true. B, false. The answer is B, false. Activity using websites like the CIA's World Factbook build a presentation about modern day North Korea. Include such facts as the country's population, a breakdown of ethnicities, and its GDP. What industries and natural resources are most prominent in North Korea's economy? Who are its largest trading partners? What type of government does North Korea have? Who are the main political power brokers? Include an assessment of what the future holds for North Korea. Do you believe that North Korea's current political system will continue to exist indefinitely? Or is its government weak and susceptible to revolution?