When three Nobel laureates (Richard Roberts, medicine; Finn Kydland, economics; and Aaron Ciechanover, economics) announced that they would take a vacation to North Korea recently, the organization that sponsored the junket, the International Peace Foundation, was at pains to declare that the trip was “not political.”
This despite the fact that the laureates planned to lecture at Kim Il-sung University, which educates the Workers’ Party elite—the people who enslave, torture, and starve their fellow countrymen. Not political. And even though they would also visit the university that trains North Korea’s nuclear scientists. Not political at all. And although the trip would hand a major propaganda coup to Kim Jong-un just as he was opening a crucial Workers’ Party Congress— no, not political in the slightest. And even though the South Korean government urged the laureates to delay their visit. No, there was not a whiff of politics to the journey at all.
So, now that the laureates have done the Kim regime’s bidding, and urged in a post-trip press conference in Beijing that sanctions on North Korea be lifted, you can be sure that, why, there was nothing “political” about it at all.
“Sanctions imposed on North Korea are hampering health and science and should be eased, a group of three Nobel laureates have said,” the BBC reported. “You cannot turn penicillin into a nuclear bomb,” said one. That’s true! But, it’s a bizarre non sequitur, given that medicine exports to North Korea do not fall under sanction.
Sanctions are “really hurting the scientists” in North Korea, averred another. If that’s the case, it’s a good thing, given that North Korean scientists spend much of their energies building weapons systems, including the nuclear devices with which the regime periodically threatens South Korea, Japan, and the United States. Prince Alfred of Liechtenstein, who joined the Nobels on their trip, also chimed in, assuring the audience that Kim Jong-un “has a good understanding of the international situation” and wants to be “a part of the international community.”
Despite all this, Uwe Morawetz, director of the International Peace Foundation, maintains that the trip was purely apolitical.
The laureates “only commented on the sanctions issue when asked in one question during the press conference in Beijing last Saturday,” he told me via email. “It was also not an issue during their entire visit to the DPRK.” (By the way, a good rule of thumb is to be wary of anybody who refers to the authoritarian, undemocratic regime in North Korea as the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” or the “DPRK.”)
Still, there’s no denying that these three luminaries lent their Nobel imprimatur to the cause of easing sanctions on Pyongyang. It’s a shame to see them promote a policy that would aid the world’s cruelest dictatorship “because, science.”
