[Tommy]

I'm not intimately familiar with the situation in North Korea, but the circumstances that led to the fall of the Berlin wall give me hope. I visited East Berlin during the cold war as part of a program the US Air Force had to familiarize pilots in combat units with our adversary. As our bus left bustling West Berlin with its street packed with multicolored cars and shoppers (it was just before Christmas), we entered East Berlin. The streets were empty and the few people we saw were all dressed in uniform shades of gray, black and dark brown. After our tour of depressing East Berlin, we visited a museum dedicated to all the ways people had used to escape from East to West. I made up my mind at that time that I would rather die attempting to escape from a communist country than live there.

A recent documentary on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall pointed out something I had not before heard. The wall fell because some East German bureaucrat being interviewed on state radio mistakenly said the gate between East and West would be temporarily opened the following day. When the time came, a crowd of more than 20,000 people was waiting to leave East Berlin. Guards at the wall realized they would be overwhelmed if they tried to stop the crowd, so the gate was opened. It was the beginning of the end for East Germany.

I suspect it would take only a tiny crack to break open the walls confining the people of North Korea. But as with the Berlin Wall, the crack may come about through some unexpected mistake rather than some grand plan.