North Korea has signaled an escalation in its “balloon war” with South Korea over the past month, sending hundreds of inflatables south. with payloads of garbage and manure. A response worthy of South Korea could involve using balloons to make deliveries. Optimistic news and K-pop music. in the deepest part of the North, not just broadcasting it over the loudspeakers on the border.
Aiming to curb North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's ongoing pursuit of nuclear weapons, South Korea could launch a balloon offensive to deliver more positive information about conditions in the outside world and especially in South Korea. , along with the optimistic strains of K-pop and K-drama sagas. Once the South has demonstrated to Kim that he is willing and able to flood the North with such content, threats of a continued deluge could inspire him to rethink his nuclear plans.
This is why. In the recent past, Kim has become paranoid about his people being exposed to outside information, particularly details about cultural milestones and lifestyle developments in South Korea. North Korea is an impoverished country. and afflicted country without freedoms, in contrast to its neighbor South Korea, a modern and globally engaged country with a population that enjoys freedom, opportunity and wealth. Showing the North Korean people how their southern counterparts live would be, at the very least, destabilizing for the regime. Kim's recent behavior suggests that he worries that outside information is already contributing to instability in the North that could one day threaten his rule.
A new balloon offensive could threaten to repeatedly hit Pyongyang with payloads of approximately one million USB drives, each loaded with South Korean music and television programs and with messages to the North Korean elite. The necessary inflatable delivery technology already exists: South Korean activists have developed “smart balloons” which could point to USB drops in specific parts of Pyongyang and also carry speakers.
Such an offensive could prompt North Korea to close one or more of its nuclear weapons production facilities or abandon plans for a seventh nuclear weapons test, and South Korea should reward either of these measures by ending the bombing. media. As long as Pyongyang refuses to give in so significantly, the declines should continue and widen.
A few years ago, Kim called K-pop a “Vicious cancer” corrupts the young people of the North. Its state media has warned that if left unchecked, North Korea “Crumbling like a wet wall.” And what could be more terrifying for a third-generation dictator like Kim than having his regime crumble?
Kim apparently hopes that by portraying South Koreans as enemies of the North Korean people and imposing severe sanctions on those who consume things from South Korea, he can prevent his people from learning about the outside world.
But these measures may only be delaying the inevitable: many North Koreans do not believe in the indoctrination of the Kim regime, which laughably portrays North Korea as autopia surrounded by a hellish outside world.”
Threatening a crackdown with K-pop and other information delivered via balloons could be an important component of a campaign to influence the North Korean regime. In addition to millions of airdrops, South Korea and the United States could use their media resources to support Korean-language reporting on the failures of the North Korean regime and the human rights violations and suffering of the North Korean people.
Washington and Seoul could also increase transmissions to the North in ways that circumvent or overwhelm North Korean interference. And they could threaten to continue and even increase the recently restarted broadcasts across the Demilitarized Zone, which Kim would find objectionable in part because many of the North Korean soldiers there come from elite families living in Pyongyang, families who Kim especially wants to isolate. of external information.
Information efforts could also be increased elsewhere. For example, South Korea and the United States could distribute information and K-pop to North Korean diplomats and businessmen abroad, to North Korean front companies in several other countries, and to North Korean soldiers who are likely to be on the Russian front supporting the use of artillery. and North Korean missiles against Ukraine.
With the survival of his regime at stake, the threat of an ongoing information campaign relying on balloon launches, followed by the use of other technologies, could help push Kim to back off his immediate plans, such as another nuclear test, and to rethink its general strategy. nuclear ambitions. South Korea and the United States could tell Kim that if he does not agree to a freeze on nuclear weapons production, his regime should be prepared to be shaken by a great information offensive.
There is power in information, and Kim has repeatedly noted that he is terrified by it. South Korea and the United States have few levers to apply against the North. It is clear that they should use the delivery of information that could destabilize the regime.
Bruce W. Bennett is a senior international and defense researcher at Rand. corporation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research institution.
