Most people who know the phrase learnt it from television. Early in Squid Game, an enormous doll turns its head, a child's chant rings across a schoolyard, and the players caught moving are eliminated in the most permanent sense. The chant is Mugunghwa kkochi pieotseumnida, "the rose of Sharon has bloomed", and in Korea it belongs to every child who has ever played the freezing game that English speakers call Red Light, Green Light. Rather fewer viewers know that in 1993 the same words became the title of a novel. By the figures usually quoted, it sold some three million copies within about a year. It was not about a game.
I am asked from time to time whether the book is worth reading. My answer is a slightly awkward one. I would not urge anyone to reread it. I would urge everyone who has heard of it to remember it, and to remember it properly: as an artefact, a symptom and a warning, and not as a source of facts. The difference matters more in 2026 than it did in 1993, and this essay is my attempt to draw it.
The premise is simple, and it is a good one. In the winter of 1978 a newspaper reporter in Seoul hears of a murder. The victim turns out to be a nuclear physicist, buried in the national cemetery by order of the president, an honour that makes no sense for a man with no family in the country. The reporter pulls at the thread. At the far end of it he finds a president who wants his country to have a nuclear deterrent of its own, and powers abroad who have no intention of allowing one. The physicist, the author has said, was modelled on a real man: Lee Hwi-so (Benjamin W. Lee in the West), a Korean-born theoretical physicist who died in a road accident in the United States in June 1977, aged forty-two, when a lorry crossed the centre line and struck his car. As far as I have been able to establish, the novel has never appeared in English, though Korea's own literary institute renders the title as The Rose of Sharon Blooms Again.
It is a page-turner in the honourable sense of the term, and it arrived at the right moment. In 1993 the first nuclear crisis on the peninsula was under way: in March the North had announced that it would withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the world spent the following months wondering whether it meant it. Readers who were meeting the bomb in the headlines found a story that let them think about it from the comfortable posture of a person with a paperback.
Here the trouble begins. Lee's family took the author and another writer to court, complaining that a real man's life had been rewritten and his death blamed on a foreign intelligence service. In June 1995 the Seoul District Court declined to stop the book, and its reasoning is the best literary criticism I have found on the subject. A novel, said the court, presupposes invention; when a writer models a character on a real person, even a famous one, the reality that appears on the page has become a literary creation. Lee, it added, was a public figure who must tolerate a degree of public attention, and I understand this to be the first Korean judgment to use the term. In 1998 a claim for damages failed too. According to a newspaper report of the day, the judges accepted that parts of the story, the killing by a foreign agency among them, had no foundation in fact, but held that they served the drama and did not amount to defamation.
Those who had known Lee were less indulgent than the judges. Colleagues who had worked beside him dismissed the tale as invention, and a former minister of science called it nonsense. Even the author of the earlier book on which the novelist drew later conceded, in a broadcast interview, that about a fifth of it was fiction, and that the fiction lay in the very passages where Lee is drawn into the nuclear programme. By the testimony of those closest to him, the real man had no part in any such thing.
And yet the ground under the fiction is not imaginary. Declassified diplomatic papers, published by the Wilson Center and the National Security Archive, show that in the mid-1970s the government in Seoul went after a plutonium reprocessing plant from France; that Washington and Ottawa leaned on it hard; that the National Assembly ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty in March 1975 under that pressure; and that the effort was wound up by the end of 1976. The novel invented the man and kept the question. Its author found a genuine anxiety and hung a false story on it, which is what popular fiction does at its best and at its worst.
Why not reread it, then? Partly because a thriller is a machine with a single use, and once you have watched it work there is little to learn from watching again. Mostly because a book that passes for history is a hazard to the reader who trusts it. Popular novels about real events have a way of hardening, in the public mind, into the events themselves: the invented letter becomes a remembered letter, the invented death a remembered death. Lee's family understood this earlier than most, which is why they went to court, and their losing does not make them wrong. A reader who returns to the book in search of what really happened will find a good story and a false answer. A reader who remembers it, with the court's verdict in one pocket and the archives in the other, will find something more useful: a measure of how badly a country wanted an answer.
A thriller is built to move, and motion does not linger. Whatever route a nuclear plot takes to its last chapter, the sums that matter are seldom done on the page, so let me do a few here.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 released about fifteen kilotons of TNT equivalent. I use it only as a ruler. The warheads in service today are not its equals but multiples of it: the W88 carried on American submarine-launched missiles is rated at 475 kilotons, about thirty times as much, and the B83 gravity bomb at up to 1.2 megatons, some eighty times. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute counted 12,187 nuclear warheads in the world in January 2026, of which 9,745 sat in military stockpiles and 4,012 were deployed with operational forces, more than two thousand of them held on high alert.
Then comes the arithmetic after the arithmetic. A team led by Lili Xia at Rutgers University modelled the soot that burning cities would throw into the upper atmosphere, and published the result in Nature Food in 2022. A war between India and Pakistan, they estimated, could leave more than two billion people dead of famine; a war between the United States and Russia, more than five billion. Models are not prophecies, and I do not offer these as such. But they were built by careful people with the best tools available, and I cannot find in them a war that anyone wins.
For a Scot, the most sobering pages of this subject are those about the peninsula itself, because Korea has already lived through a war, and the record of it is not a rumour. The Korean War killed at least two and a half million people, by Britannica's count. A North Korean census report found in the Russian archives and published by the Wilson Center shows the northern population falling from about 9.4 million in 1948 to about 7.4 million in 1953, a loss of one fifth. South Korea's own defence ministry has put its civilian dead at some 374,000. All of it came without a single nuclear weapon.
The question of nuclear weapons was not far away, and it was said aloud. At a press conference on 30 November 1950, with Chinese armies driving south, President Truman was asked whether the atomic bomb was under active consideration. He replied that it always had been, added that he did not wish to see it used, and called it a terrible weapon that should not be turned on innocent men, women and children. The American State Department's own published records preserve the exchange.
Now the present. In 2017 an independent analyst, Michael Zagurek Jr., published on 38 North, a specialist site on North Korea, a modelling exercise on a hypothetical nuclear attack on two East Asian capitals, and I quote only the figures for Seoul. Seoul proper, he notes, holds some seventeen thousand people to the square kilometre. For a single 250-kiloton warhead bursting in the air over Seoul and its neighbour Incheon, with some twenty-four million people between them, his figures come to roughly 783,000 dead and 2.8 million injured. That is about twice the number of South Korean civilians estimated to have died in the whole of the last war, from one weapon, in one instant. Zagurek himself calls such figures estimates resting on narrow assumptions, and the assumptions are those of 2017. I quote them not as a forecast but as a scale.
The numbers themselves are in dispute again. In August a remark in Washington put North Korea's arsenal at fifty-seven warheads. The Stockholm institute's estimate, published in June, is about sixty assembled; South Korean official estimates have been reported as higher still. Three counts of one arsenal, each delivered with the calm of arithmetic. This, to my mind, is where a thriller from 1993 earns its place in 2026. It reminds us how easily a story slides into the space where evidence ought to be, and how quickly numbers become plot.
I write, as readers of this blog know, from Edinburgh, and I should confess to a certain dryness of temperament in these matters. My own country is no neutral spectator of the subject. The Royal Navy's submarine base at Faslane lies about twenty-five miles west of Glasgow, and the missiles of the British deterrent are stored close by at Coulport. I state that as a fact of geography, not as an opinion. It does mean that a Scot reading a Korean novel about the wish for a bomb reads it without the luxury of abstraction. What a foreigner notices, from that distance, is how rarely stories of this kind ask the reader to picture the day after.
So the book is to be remembered, and not gone back to. It is worth remembering that a novel can make a nation talk about the unspeakable in the only voice it can bear, which is the voice of a story. It is worth remembering that the court, of all critics, had it right: this is invention, and it should be read as invention. And it is worth remembering that what lies in the archives is duller and sadder than the plot, and that the arithmetic after the plot is worse than either.
I no longer own a copy. It went, with too many others, in the move from my university lodgings, and I have not replaced it. Having written all this, I find that I do not mind.
In the schoolyard game, the child caught moving goes back to the starting line and tries again. Nothing in the figures above offers any of us a starting line to go back to. A novel is the one place where the unthinkable can still be played like that, and I suspect that is the only use this one has left.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase the Original (Korean Edition): Mugunghwa kkochi pieotseumnida (무궁화꽃이 피었습니다), Kim Jin-myung, Aladin Bookstore / To my knowledge, no English translation exists.
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- SIPRI Yearbook 2026, "World nuclear forces", Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2026.
- Lili Xia et al., "Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection", Nature Food 3 (2022).
- Michael J. Zagurek Jr., "A Hypothetical Nuclear Attack on Seoul and Tokyo: The Human Cost of War on the Korean Peninsula", 38 North, 4 October 2017.
- Seoul District Court, ruling of 23 June 1995, Case No. 94 Kahap 9230 (the Lee Hwi-so injunction case).