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.