The Weird Science of North Korea

Pyongyang's national flower exhibition, displaying the Kimilsungia and the Kimjongilia, the DPRK's national flowers. Photo by Maxime Delvaux
No matter whose finger is in charge of pushing the big red button, nuclear bombs are scary things. But put them in the hands of leaders who appear to believe in unicorns and you get the same kind of unease you’d feel while watching a toddler play with a loaded gun on fire. So how does the world’s least rational regime cope with science, the world’s most rational discipline?
The answer, for the most part, has been a sort of relentless pragmatism. North Korea leaves research for research's sake to the decadent West, and regards dollars, industrial output, or better weapons as the most important outcome of any scientific program. In some cases this approach has been quite lucrative, with advances in drug manufacturing opening up new streams of income to match the dollars earned from exporting giant patriotic statues to sub-Saharan Africa. In possibly the first example of a country taking its economic policy directly from Breaking Bad, the Koreans have built meth labs and are exporting product into China and perhaps even the West via its network of diplomats. Drugs are now so easily available, and real medicines so hard to obtain, that locals are using them medicinally—heroin is now a common treatment for colds in some parts of the country.
North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un, sounds like the world leader you'd want fielding the "science and nature" questions in Trivial Pursuit, at least on paper. As well as holding a degree in physics, the planet’s youngest head of state is renowned across almost the whole of North Korea as an expert in the social sciences.

A student in the Kim Il Sung University computer lab.
His accomplishments in the field are so great that, last August, a symposium took place in Pyongyang dedicated to the “ideas and theories clarified by the dear respected Kim Jong Un in his recent works.” These works include landmark publications of papers such as, “The Great Comrade Kim Il Sung Is the Eternal Leader of Our Party and People,” the lavishly titled, “Let Us Brilliantly Accomplish the Revolutionary Cause of Juche, Holding the Great Comrade Kim Jong Il in High Esteem as the Eternal General Secretary of Our Party,” and, of course, “Let’s Dynamically Struggle for Final Victory, Holding Aloft the Banner of Songun”—regarded by many as a sort of The Selfish Gene of politics (though you can't imagine any of them do particularly well in SEO terms).
According to the Korean Central News Agency, papers were presented at the symposium that proved "the greatness of the ideas and theories of Kim Jong-un," and doctors and professors lined up entirely of their own free will to praise the dictator. Dr. Yon Jong Sul, for example, “noted that Kim Jong Un in his works elucidated Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism as the only guiding idea of the Workers' Party of Korea and the Korean revolution,” while Dr. Hong Thae Yon “recalled that Kim Jong Un scientifically formulated the idea that when the single-minded unity, the invincible military muscle and the industrial revolution in the new century are added up, they make a thriving socialist nation.”
It's compelling stuff. Overall, it sounds like everyone involved had a great time thrusting their entirely objective case studies in the general direction of the Supreme Leader.        
Given Kim Jong Un’s many glorious achievements, you’re probably wondering why North Korea’s top scientists haven’t created, from scratch, a special new flower for him yet, like they did for his dad and his granddad. Only recently, a national scientific symposium was held to discuss vital new research on the flowers Kimilisungia and Kimjongilia, two immortal breeds of Begonia produced by North Korea’s leading science wizards in honor of the young man’s predecessors. So far, though, a Kimjongunia specimen remains conspicuously elusive.