What do you think of when you hear the word "famine"? Do you think about natural disasters, unpredictable tragedies, the loss of innocent lives? Tragedy and death are inherent in the concept of large-scale starvation, but the nature of some famines may have as much to do with politics as with the environment. What I expected to find when I began my research on the 1994-98 famine in North Korea was large-scale food shortages due, for the most part, to terrible growing conditions, extreme climates, and unpredictable circumstances and not preventable. Of course, my knowledge of the famine was limited to what I knew of the countryside of pre-Communist China, where sustenance provided by the land was the bare minimum, and any number of external changes that negatively affected growth or access to crops could equal devastation for entire regions. Keeping this as a frame of reference, I was surprised by the unique political circumstances behind the famine in North Korea. The famine that killed 2-3 million people in the 1990s was more closely linked to its independence from the southern half of the Korean Peninsula it once shared, the fall of communism and the Soviet Union, than to any single natural disaster. Millions of people died because their government prioritized their independence over their survival, their budget over their livelihood. North Korea's famine was born out of the conflict of the 1950s, fueled by the politics of the 1990s, and sustained by human error and domestic arrogance. North Korea is known as the “Hermit Kingdom”. Defensive and secretive to the point of paranoia, his history and current condition remain shrouded in mystery. What little we know may be murky at best. The central government... half of the paper... was instrumental in the disaster. Climate, conflict, isolation and corruption have culminated in the loss of millions of lives, certainly with no small amount of pain and suffering endured. While international intervention can only help as much as North Korean authorities allow, we are not left entirely without recourse. It is now too late to undo the damage of the North Korean famine, and although power has changed hands, the country remains notoriously isolated. But if we tell the story as best we can and deny ourselves the comfort of turning a blind eye to such a colossal tragedy, then perhaps in the future we will find a solution. Silent are the Koreans who died, and still silent are the authorities who chose isolation over security. If we want to prevent this from happening again, we must not let their silence also be our silence.