Calm down about North Korea’s Nukes
On Monday, North Korea once again test-launched ballistic
missiles, feeding fears about the erratic regime’s
progress on nuclear weapons and what it might mean for
regional security. But Americans and their Asian allies have
good reason to calm their reflexive panic over this issue.
Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program is widely considered
to be the most pressing international security issue today.
The regime has carried out five nuclear tests since 2006 and
has vowed
to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)
that can deliver a nuclear warhead to U.S. soil.
A senior, if unnamed, Trump administration official told
reporters recently that the president believes the
“greatest immediate threat” to the U.S. is North Korea and
its nuclear program. Last week on CNN, Senator John McCain described
it as an “immediate danger,” and brought up the prospect
of preventive military action because “they don’t think like
us” — meaning that the North Korean regime is not
necessarily averse, the way other countries are, to using
nuclear weapons.
To some observers, the fact that North Korea is trying to become a
full-fledged nuclear power is evidence enough of its aggressive
intentions. Failing to somehow block Pyongyang’s path to the bomb, they
argue, risks nuclear war with an unstable, irrational, paranoid
totalitarian state.
But scholarship counsels that we keep a cool head. Few experts go so
far as to suggest that Pyongyang would initiate nuclear war with South
Korea or the United States. The North Korean regime would have to be
eager to commit national suicide, since such an act of aggression would
trigger a retaliatory response that would promise its total destruction.
Despite McCain’s suggestion, North Korea is just as deterred by nuclear
retaliation as was the Soviet Union, or Mao’s China.
There is another argument, however, which says that while North Korea
is unlikely to start a nuclear war, its burgeoning nuclear arsenal will
ultimately allow it to coerce and bully other countries. This argument
also holds that nukes can enable states to act more aggressively at the
conventional level, since they know others will be deterred from
full retaliation.
But that turns out not to be true. In a new book, political
scientists Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann argue
that nuclear coercion doesn’t really work. They analyze multiple
data sets of hundreds of historical examples and find that nuclear
states don’t have more leverage in settling territorial disputes, they
don’t initiate military challenges more often, they are not more likely
to escalate ongoing conflicts, and they are not more likely to
successfully blackmail adversaries. In short, nuclear weapons don’t give
states more coercive ability.
Recent history with North Korea seems to bear this out. In 2013,
Pyongyang made a
serious attempt at nuclear coercion. Following its third nuclear
test, in February of that year, the Kim Jong Un regime threatened to
bomb South Korea and the United States with “lighter and smaller nukes.”
In response, the UN Security Council imposed additional economic
sanctions on North Korea, which elicited an
even bolder threat: the North unilaterally voided the 1953 armistice
and threatened to “exercise the right to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to
destroy the strongholds of the aggressors.”
Presumably, these threats were aimed at making the menace of
Pyongyang’s nukes more credible and at coercing the international
community to lift the devastating economic sanctions. It didn’t work. No
one found the threats credible, harsher sanctions were imposed, and
joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises proceeded apace.
In reality, nuclear weapons are good for one thing and one thing
only: deterrence. North Korea’s determination to get the bomb is likely
borne out of fear elicited by, among other things,
consistent U.S. promises to one day overthrow the regime. Policymakers
and think tank reports frequently pose this as an option to settle the
70-year stalemate on the Korean Peninsula. A fully capable North Korean
nuclear weapons program would protect Pyongyang from invasion and
overthrow, but it wouldn’t give them greater leverage against enemies.
This doesn’t mean we should all welcome the North Korean bomb. More
nuclear weapons in the possession of isolated, risk-acceptant
authoritarian regimes is not a good thing. It arguably raises the
chances of accident or miscalculation. But it doesn’t necessarily mean a
more powerful, more aggressive North Korea.
John
Glaser is Associate Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato
Institute
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