The 80-year history of the Workers’ Party of Korea records the Fifth Plenary Meeting of its Fourth Central Committee held in December 1962, at which an independent crucial decision was made to remarkably increase the might of the country.

At this meeting the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung put forward the line of simultaneously promoting economic construction and defence building and the slogan “Rifle in one hand and hammer or sickle in the other!” for the first time in history.

It was shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 that Kim Il Sung decided to simultaneously push forward with economic construction and defence building.

One day he met officials and told them: We should learn a lesson from the Cuban situation. It is nothing but an illusion to think that if the Yankees ignite a war in our country, other country would fire missiles for us. We have never thought of it nor want it.

It was a challenge for the DPRK to develop the economy and national defence simultaneously in the prevailing situation of the country. Doing so meant that the Korean people should tighten their belts again. They had never enjoyed a rich life as they had to build a new country after the country’s liberation from Japanese military occupation, wage the Fatherland Liberation War, rehabilitate the country after the war and lay the foundations of socialism.

This is why Kim Il Sung convened five rounds of political committee and consultative meetings on the issue of simultaneously promoting the two fronts.

Recollecting those days, he once said:

The prevailing situation required that we increase the production of weapons even though we had to postpone the development of light industry a little. During the Fatherland Liberation War we had to make a strategic temporary retreat because we were short of guns. From this bitter experience, we decided to produce weapons by ourselves even if it meant altering the national economic plan. We convened a plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee at which we adopted the line of undertaking economic and defence construction simultaneously. At the meeting we said that we revolutionaries did not need to be dressed well, that all we needed was to eat and keep ourselves from being frozen to death, that we might be destroyed by depending on others, instead of defending our revolutionary gains by our own effort, and that we ourselves must defend our country at whatever the cost.

Afterwards, the Party took a series of important measures to further strengthen the defence capabilities while stepping up economic construction in accordance with the new revolutionary line. And at its Second Conference it reiterated the tasks and ways for implementing the line and took measures to postpone the Seven-Year National Economic Plan for three years.

Thanks to his resolute decision, measures and wise leadership, the DPRK could frustrate the US imperialists’ every move for invasion and a new war, and its people could reliably defend the dignity of their country and achieve epochal successes in economic construction.

Today the DPRK is fully demonstrating its might as a military power with tremendous military muscle capable of wiping out any hostile forces at a single blow under the wise guidance of the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un .

O Hyok Jin