Kim Song Ju, the man who would become Kim Il Sung, was born to devout Presbyterian parents. Billy Graham’s wife was born to christian missionaries in China and went to high school in Pyongyang. American protestants once spread the gospel in northwest Korea and found fertile ground for their gospel message. Kim listened, learned, and used those teachings to shape a cult of personality that rules North Korea to this day.

On this episode of Angry Planet I’m joined by Wall Street Journal China bureau chief Jonathan Cheng to talk about his new book Korean Messiah. Cheng’s work is an exploration of the origins of North Korea and Kim’s deep ties to American Christianity.

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• Angry Planet as dress rehearsal
• Billy Graham in the Hermit Kingdom
• 19th century Protestant missionaries in Korea
• Presbyterians in the untamed northwest
• Untangling the history of a self-made godking
• The Kim Song Ju nativity
• Women without names
• Attending church during the Fire and Fury period
• The Soviet era
• Leading from beyond the grave
• Kim bombs his first public appearance

Buy Korean Messiah

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Recorded March 24, 2026. Subscribe at angryplanetpod.com to hear episodes first and commercial free.

Last week an article published in Al Jazeera by an academic at the University of Doha in Qatar proposed something that felt crazy to some western war watchers: America and Israel’s strategy in Iran is working.

On this episode of Angry Planet, author Muhanad Seloom is here to explain his position. Seloom is an assistant professor of international politics and security at the University of Doha. He’s also an Iraqi who lived through the Iran-Iraq war and both US invasions. From his perspective, the US has degraded Iran’s ability to hurt its neighbors in the long term and changed the regime.

What comes next is a more complicated question.

• Why did this war even start?
• Setting aside morality and legality to look at ground truths
• “Iran is much weaker”
• Missile production, missile range
• The highly enriched uranium is in one place
• “The regime has changed. Whether we like it or not, the regime has changed.”
• The case against the new Khamenei
• What is it like to live nextdoor to Iran?
• There’s a reason no one is standing up for Iran
• Why isn’t the GCC doing more?
• What happens if we pick up and leave?
• What’s the plan for what happens next?
• “It’s not easy to rise up.”
• Charging tolls on Hormuz
• “I have to say this: I am against the war in any way.”
• What about the JCPOA?
• A great unanswered question of history
• Air campaigns don’t win wars
• …did America really lose in Afghanistan and Iraq?
• “War is hell.”

Labelling Ethno-Political Groups as Terrorists

The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why

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America went to war in Iran, we’re told, because the idea of the country developing nuclear weapons was intolerable. Nukes are complicated and technical weapons that require scientists and experts to build, maintain, and manage. Highly enriched uranium (HEU) is core to the design and unless all of Iran’s HEU is accounted for the threat of it becoming a nuclear power will linger.

So what would it take to get rid of Iran’s stockpile HEU?

François Diaz-Maurin is on Angry Planet today to answer that question. Diaz-Maurin is editor for nuclear affairs at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists where he recently published an article outlining what it would take for US troops to neutralize Iran’s highly enriched uranium.

• How a civil engineer becomes a nuclear journalist
• “You can’t bomb away nuclear material.”
• “Technically, it’s nearly Mission Impossible.”
• How much highly enriched uranium (HEU) was left after last year’s strikes?
• Moving HEU around Iran
• What we can learn from satellite photos and the International Atomic Energy Agency
• Why 60%?
• Managing scuba tanks full of gaseous toxins in a war zone
• Why blowing up the cylinders won’t work
• “Let me throw something weird at you.”
• Downblending versus exporting
• We’re living in the third nuclear age
• Deterrence works and that’s, maybe, not great?

Trump may send US troops to neutralize Iran’s highly enriched uranium. There are no good options

Netanyahu says Iran no longer has uranium enrichment capacity

Iran willing to dilute uranium stockpile as fresh protests erupt

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