300,000 Soldiers Built a Dam as Kim Il Sung Masked Systemic Desperation

By Vera Kessler · August 13, 2026

Behind choreographed flatteries, Kim Il Sung confessed to Erich Honecker that his people lacked food and clothing while 1,000 nuclear warheads threatened to turn his country into complete rubble.

October 19, 1986. The setting is the Presidential Palace in Pyongyang. The participants are Erich Honecker, General Secretary of the SED and Chairman of the GDR State Council, and Kim Il Sung, General Secretary of the KWP and President of the DPRK. According to the public record, Honecker was the leader of East Germany from 1971 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and was viewed as a dictator. In this meeting, recorded in a transcript provided by the Wilson Center Digital Archive, the two men exchange the highly choreographed flatteries of the socialist camp, but beneath the rhetoric of "fraternal comradeship-in-arms," there is a ledger of systemic desperation.

High Chairs and Spine Problems

The dialogue opens with an insistence on the visibility of their friendship. Kim Il Sung notes that the people of Pyongyang had viewed a film of Honecker’s 1984 visit to Berlin many times, leading to a welcome for the East German leader that Kim claims involved the "so far longest line-up" of citizens in the history of the DPRK. Honecker returns the sentiment, noting that while the two countries are distant, the "sun rises in the East."

There is a poignant, physical interruption to the ideological flow. The transcript includes a parenthetical note regarding the seating: Kim Il Sung explains that the "high chairs" used in the meeting were specially crafted to accommodate his spine problems. He notes that his condition had improved sufficiently to allow him to fly to the Soviet Union at the end of October. It is a rare glimpse of frailty in a record otherwise dominated by claims of "unshakable" power and the longevity of their shared ideas, with Honecker observing that while they had grown older since 1977, their "idea is alive."

Vinalon and the Nampo Dam

After a gap in the record—twelve pages are omitted where Honecker reports on the achievements of the GDR—the conversation shifts to the internal struggles of the North Korean state. Kim Il Sung is candid about the deficiencies of his country compared to the "highly developed socialist country" of the GDR. He identifies three basic failures: feeding the population, housing, and clothing.

On the matter of food, Kim admits that of the two million hectares of agricultural land, only 1.5 million are actually arable. He describes the struggle to harvest 15 million tons of grain from this limited space and mentions the Nampo Dam project, completed in June 1986. The dam was designed to block salt water from the sea and provide 2.9 billion tons of fresh water for irrigation. The cost of this project was not measured in currency, but in manpower; Kim explicitly states the Nampo Dam was "built by 300,000 soldiers."

The clothing crisis is framed through the lens of synthetic chemistry. Lacking cotton, the DPRK relied on Vinalon, a fiber produced from limestone and anthracite coal. Kim outlines a plan to increase production at a new plant in Suncheon, aiming for a total of 200,000 tons of synthetic fibers annually. This, he claims, would allow the state to produce 1.5 billion meters of cloth per year, or roughly "83 meters cloth per capita of the population annually," which would "basically" solve the clothing issue.

A Confederation of Goryeo

The conversation eventually turns toward the South. Kim paints a picture of a South Korea in turmoil, citing a demonstration of 15,000 students chanting "Americans out of Korea!" and "down with the military dictatorship." He argues that the United States is not a liberator but an aggressor that exploits the South through "American and Japanese monopolists."

Kim discusses his proposal for a "Confederation of Goryeo" and the desire to replace the current armistice agreement with a formal peace treaty. He claims that the United States resists such a move because a non-aggression treaty between the two Koreas would "pull the rug under the stationing of American troops." The tension is quantified by a stark figure: Kim asserts there are more than 1,000 nuclear warheads deployed in South Korea, claiming that only two "would be sufficient to turn our country into complete rubble."

Throughout the latter half of the transcript, Kim aligns himself with the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, praising his speeches in Reykjavik and Vladivostok, while dismissing Ronald Reagan as an "errand boy of the big American monopolists." He sees the Soviet-American nuclear disarmament talks in Geneva as the only path toward a "nuclear-free zone of peace on the Korean peninsula."

As the meeting draws to a close, the high-level geopolitical analysis returns to the pragmatic needs of the state. Kim reminds Honecker that the GDR provided the automation equipment for the first Vinalon factory in the 1960s. He asks for similar support for the new plant in Suncheon, stating that GDR equipment would allow construction to move forward "very rapidly." Günter Mittag, present at the meeting, responds that he will discuss the problem the following day with Comrade Ri Jong-ok.