Nobody knows when and why did the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) begin its nuclear weapon program. Our current state of knowledge regarding these simple questions is at best partial; scholars point to different periods as its origin such as 1950 (when the Korean War broke out), 1958 (when the United Stated brought nuclear weapons to South Korea), 1964 (when the People’s Republic of China tested its first bomb), or 1979 (when South Korea started its undeclared enrichment activities that were revealed only in 2014). How about why? Virtually, all relevant works assume that the single most important reason for North Korea’s “going nuclear” was a security concern. And that’s it.

My article offers a new narrative that helps us better understand how North Korea embraced nuclear power reluctantly in the first place, moving our mode of inquiry beyond the questions of when and why. Drawing upon previously unexamined Soviet archival sources (including those housed in an economic archive, or RGAE) and North Korean techno-scientific publications, I explore how North Koreans understood and tried to possess nuclear power for “peaceful” purposes from liberation of 1945 to the completion of the Yongbyon Center in 1965.

It stems from my fundamental question on how to study the past of North Korea, one of the most extremely secretive countries. For historians of North Korea, accessing archival sources is extremely tricky; North Korean archives are off-limits to outside researchers, and visiting repositories in Russia as a detour is by no means an easy business. Worse, using Russian sources is not a panacea, as North Korea tightened its information flow to Soviet diplomats starting in 1959. Subsequently, Soviet diplomatic documents contained less-detailed, less-reliable information, compared to those produced in the previous years. In order to address this issue, I have tried to examine as much archival sources and publications as possible that were available.

While Kim Il-sung’s decision to have his own bombs would remain unanswered for a while, my article shows that economic considerations were the most significant driving factor that steered North Korea’s nuclear program from its onset. However, North Korea’s rosy nuclear dream to introduce a Soviet-made research reactor met a price tag of high costs and technological burdens to further “peaceful” nuclear technologies; for example, North Korean officials by 1962 were debating whether they had to send reactor parts back to Moscow. If Kim always craved for his own bombs, as all of the relevant accounts assume, why then his country in the early 1960s did not use all resources to fast-track the delivery of nuclear facilities to initiate accumulating fissile materials for nuclear warheads? Rather, North Korean planners by the mid-1960s realized that investing in “peaceful” nuclear technologies would not bear fruit in the foreseeable future. Overturning teleological accounts, my article provides a powerful tool to revisit the reality of North Korea’s quest for nuclear-powered industry, which turned out to be a complete failure.