Biosecurity

Potemkin or real? North Korea’s biological weapons program

Kim Jung-un’s June 2015 visit to a pesticide facility—Pyongyang’s Bio-technical Institute—rekindled long-standing suspicions that North Korea might be developing bioweapons. Photos of the tour, shown on North Korean television, showed a smiling Kim. He posed with military officers and personnel in lab coats in front of apparently new buildings, with sparkling laboratories and shiny equipment. The tour took place amid tensions with the United States—and soon after a US military laboratory accidentally shipped live anthrax to a US airbase in South Korea, an accident that Pyongyang translated as an act of aggression. These circumstances contributed to a belief that the visit to the pesticide facility was designed to send a message to the United States: that North Korea has an active bioweapons program.