A Southern California minister, Douglas Shin, will leave this weekend for South Korea on a small-scale mission that’s worth watching. He’s going to make plans for a launch next month of thousands of helium-filled balloons carrying radios for the people of North Korea. During a time when America is spending billions of dollars promoting democracy with troops abroad, Rev. Shin’s mission is quaintly small-scale. His trip is taking place this weekend because until now, “I didn’t have the money,” he told us. A $3,000 grant from Christian Solidarity Worldwide – USA is making the trip possible, and an e-mail campaign will help him raise a total of about $20,000 to fund balloons, helium, radios, and some money to put in each airborne package.

The radios are important because of the stranglehold on information that the government has in a totalitarian society. “If you send in enough radios, then they’ll have to give up on clamping down on the people,” Rev. Shin said. He cited the example of about six years ago, when North Korean refugees streamed across the border to China. “Too many people were leaving. They couldn’t shoot them all down,” he recalled. If all North Koreans had radios, they might all head for the borders and try to escape. Or they might head for the streets and topple the Communist dictator, Kim Jong Il.

Rev. Shin, 48, who immigrated to America from Korea with his parents when he was a child, is an optimist about the prospects for liberty in North Korea. But he recognizes that one man can only loft so many radios over the 38 th Parallel. There are other actors that might get involved. The purpose of next month’s balloon release, he said, “is to mobilize the U.S. government.” Rep. Ed Royce, a Republican of California, and Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat of California, last month added an amendment to the State Department Authorization Bill. The amendment expressed the sense of Congress that Radio Free Asia broadcasts to North Korea should be expanded to 24 hours a day from the current four. And it requires the Secretary of State to report to Congress on “specific measures currently being undertaken and measures necessary, including the provision of adequate radios, to maximize North Korean citizen access to Radio Free Asia and other foreign broadcasts.”

Rev. Shin points out that compared to the alternatives — appeasing a harsh regime or attacking and sparking an all-out war that might lead to many deaths — the radio option has its attraction. It already seems to have caught the attention of the tyranny at Pyongyang. On Friday the regime’s organ, Rodong Sinmun, complained that “Recently, the U.S. imperialists brought a great number of transistor radios into the DPRK to destabilize the DPRK, while letting the radio broadcast in Korean day and night.” The Associated Press, which noted the Rodong Sinmun commentary, added that the Communists of the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” complained that the broadcasts were spreading “the American way of corrupt mental, cultural and moral life among Asian countries.” In America, we call that freedom.