Missiles Before Medicine: The Staggering Human Price of Kim Jong-un's Nuclear Obsession

On November 18, 2022, North Korea launched its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile to date — the Hwasong-17, a behemoth capable of reaching the continental United States. State television broadcast the launch in triumphant slow motion, with Kim Jong-un beaming alongside his young daughter. What the cameras did not show was the city of Hyesan, in Ryanggang Province, where residents were reportedly subsisting on corn gruel and tree bark after a catastrophic harvest failure went unaddressed by a government that had just spent an estimated $700 million on missile tests in a single year. That grotesque contradiction — rockets soaring while citizens starve — is the defining story of North Korea in the 21st century.

North Korea
North Korea Untold

A Budget Written in Hunger

Estimating North Korea's defense expenditure is, by design, nearly impossible. Pyongyang publishes no credible national budget. But analysts at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) have pieced together a damning picture. Between 2021 and 2023, North Korea conducted more than 100 ballistic missile tests — more than in the entire preceding decade combined. The cost of each Hwasong-17 launch is estimated at between $50 million and $100 million. That is money that does not go to hospitals, to grain imports, or to the crumbling water infrastructure that epidemiologists warn is seeding cholera and typhoid across provincial cities.

Lee Jung-ho, a former mid-level official in the Korean Workers' Party who defected to South Korea via China in March 2021, described the internal logic of this spending to North Korea Untold in a series of interviews conducted in Seoul in late 2023. "We were told, from the very top, that the nuclear deterrent was the rice bowl of the nation," he said. "But that was a lie told to officials who then told it to the people. The rice bowls were empty. The missiles were full." Lee, who worked in the party's finance department in South Pyongan Province, said that local government budgets were routinely raided to meet central government quotas he understood to be linked to weapons procurement. "If the county hospital needed new boilers, they waited. If Pyongyang needed a transfer, it happened that week."

The Arithmetic of Deprivation

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated in its 2023 assessment that 42 percent of North Korea's population — roughly 10.9 million people — were food insecure. The World Food Programme has been effectively barred from meaningful operations inside the country since 2021, when Kim Jong-un sealed the borders under the pretext of COVID-19 controls. Those borders remain functionally closed to humanitarian actors even as they have quietly reopened for arms transfers to Russia, confirmed by U.S. and South Korean intelligence officials in September 2023.

Park Soo-yeon defected from Chongjin, the industrial capital of North Hamgyong Province, in August 2022 after her younger brother died from what she believes was tuberculosis compounded by malnutrition. He was 23 years old. "There was medicine at the pharmacy — if you had hard currency," she told this reporter in a safe house in northern China before her eventual resettlement in the United Kingdom. "My family had won. We had Korean won. The medicine was in dollars or yuan. My brother died in the same month the television showed a new missile test. I remember thinking: that missile killed my brother." According to the WHO's last verifiable data from 2019, North Korea had one physician for every 3,571 people — a ratio worse than nearly every country in sub-Saharan Africa — and hospital infrastructure that had received virtually no capital investment since the Soviet era.

North Korea
North Korea Untold

Forced Contributions and the Shadow Economy of the Bomb

The financial extraction does not stop at the state budget. Multiple defector testimonies collected by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) in Seoul describe a system of compulsory "loyalty contributions" — euphemistically called chung-song-jaegeum, or devotion funds — levied on ordinary households, factories, and cooperative farms to fund what officials described only as "national defense projects." Kim Yong-chul, a factory manager from Wonsan who defected in 2020, told NKDB investigators that his facility was required to contribute the equivalent of three months of total worker wages annually to these funds. "We were never told what the money was for," he said. "But everyone knew. Every time there was a test on the news, the quota went up."

The regime has also systematically diverted foreign currency earned through sanctioned labor exports and cybercrime into its weapons programs. A February 2023 report by a United Nations Panel of Experts — the body that monitors sanctions compliance — found that North Korean state hackers, operating under the umbrella of the Lazarus Group and linked to the Reconnaissance General Bureau headquartered on Hyongjesan Street in Pyongyang, had stolen an estimated $1.7 billion in cryptocurrency in 2022 alone. That single year of digital theft exceeded the country's estimated total food import bill. The report named specific wallets and exchanges; within weeks, several had been emptied and the funds laundered through Chinese intermediaries.

Kim's Calculus — and Its Victims

To understand why this continues, analysts point to the fate of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein — leaders who abandoned weapons programs and were subsequently removed by force. Kim Jong-un, who consolidated total power following the execution of his uncle Jang Song-thaek in December 2013 and the assassination of his half-brother Kim Jong-nam in Kuala Lumpur in February 2017, has drawn explicit lessons from those cases in speeches to the Korean Workers' Party Central Committee. The bomb, in his calculus, is survival insurance. The suffering of the people is, at most, a manageable variable.

What is less discussed in Western policy circles is how deliberately that suffering is managed. Hwang Jang-yop, the highest-ranking North Korean official ever to defect — he fled to South Korea in 1997 and was assassinated in Seoul in 2010 — described a system in which food insecurity was not merely a byproduct of militarism but a tool of control. A hungry population, he argued in his memoir, does not organize. Decades later, that analysis holds. The people of Hyesan and Chongjin and Wonsan are not marching. They are surviving, one day at a time, in the shadow of missiles that were built with their hunger.

North Korea Untold has submitted detailed questions to the Permanent Mission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to the United Nations in New York. No response was received at the time of publication.

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