Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

Successes in Water Conservancy

Korean Central News Agency of DPRK via Korea News Service (KNS)

   Pyongyang, May 19 (KCNA) -- Sixty years have passed since the ground-breaking ceremony of the River Pothong improvement project. President Kim Il Sung initiated the project after national liberation and turned the first sod for it with a spade on May 21, Juche 35 (1946).
    The project, which could not be done for one decade during the Japanese imperialists' colonial rule, was completed within only 55 days, 15 days ahead of schedule, by the patriotic zeal of people under the wise leadership of the President.
    The Pothong River had been flooded in rainy season every year, taking a heavy toll of lives before the liberation. But the river improvement project served as a first torch for nature-remaking projects and marked the start in water conservancy.
    Since then the Korean people have energetically conducted gigantic projects for controlling water.
    They carried on the water conservancy work in full earnest in response to the call for putting a million hectares of arable land under irrigation, which was put forward at the Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea held in September 1958.
    Large-scale Kiyang, Ojidon and other irrigation projects were carried out at a colossal sum of government expense.
    The first stage of the Kiyang irrigation project was successfully completed in April 1959, more than two years ahead of the set-time thanks to the revolutionary spirit of working hard displayed by the constructors.
    Tens of large-scale water conservancy works--irrigation projects in the western coastal areas including the River Aprok area and embankment projects in the eastern coastal areas--had been pushed ahead with success.
    Within six months following the September Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the WPK, more than 9,900 irrigation reservoirs, pumping stations and other irrigation setups made their appearance, bringing 377,000 hectares of farm land under irrigation, three times that in the pre-liberation days.
    The gigantic West Sea Barrage was built and myriads of hectares of tideland were reclaimed in the western coastal areas including Kangryong, Kumsong and Taegye Islet.
    In one or two years from the end of the 1980s an 800 km-long waterway project was finished to form a large-scale circular irrigation system in the western region with the River Taedong as an axis.
    In particular, the one decade from the middle of the 1990s had witnessed the construction of the 4,000-km-long gravity-fed waterways including the Kaechon-Lake Thaesong Waterway and Paekma-Cholsan Waterway, the first of its kind in the irrigation history of the country.
    The Kwangmyongsong Saltern, the Wonsan Bay Saltern and other saltworks were built in the eastern coastal areas.