Want To Understand The Threat Of Nuclear War With North Korea? Here Are The Best Things To Read
President Donald Trump has spent the week making alarming statements about his willingness to go to war with North Korea. You may be freaking out about the possibility of nuclear war, or perhaps merely wondering whether you should be freaking out about the possibility of nuclear war. To help you make sense of it all, here are five of the best pieces of commentary and analysis on North Korea we've read this week.
How To Deal With North Korea
This long read was published in June, before Trump dramatically escalated his rhetoric threatening North Korea. But it is still relevant and enormously insightful about the complexity of American relations with North Korea problem. Mark Bowden details the risks and benefits of the four main strategies national security experts consider plausible ways of dealing with North Korea — all of which, Bowden notes, are bad.
1. Prevention: A crushing U.S. military strike to eliminate Pyongyang's arsenals of mass destruction, take out its leadership, and destroy its military. It would end North Korea's standoff with the United States and South Korea, as well as the Kim dynasty, once and for all.
2. Turning the screws: A limited conventional military attack — or more likely a continuing series of such attacks — using aerial and naval assets, and possibly including narrowly targeted Special Forces operations. These would have to be punishing enough to significantly damage North Korea's capability — but small enough to avoid being perceived as the beginning of a preventive strike. The goal would be to leave Kim Jong Un in power, but force him to abandon his pursuit of nuclear ICBMs.
3. Decapitation: Removing Kim and his inner circle, most likely by assassination, and replacing the leadership with a more moderate regime willing to open North Korea to the rest of the world.
4. Acceptance: The hardest pill to swallow — acquiescing to Kim's developing the weapons he wants, while continuing efforts to contain his ambition.
South Korea's Real Fear
Seoul has 10 million residents who act as human shields for the North, since Kim can respond to any military attack by annihilating the city. The people of Seoul generally tolerate this fact, but Anthony Spaeth explains why Trump's changed South Korea's calculus in this essay from July.
In view of Trump's unsettling foreign policy statements, Pyongyang's newfound ability to strike the US raises not one but two concerns. First is the possibility that the US might overreact with military action, provoking a North Korean attack on the south. But second is that Trump may not come to the defense of South Korea if Pyongyang can threaten to hit Los Angeles with a nuke. Trump did nothing to assuage that fear when he refused to commit himself to NATO's Article 5, which says that an attack on one ally is an attack on all, in Brussels in May. (Though he has since made that commitment.)
Indeed, some analysts believe Pyongyang's long-term strategy is to wait for a US administration that isn't fully committed to defending South Korea, and then start a second Korean War to accomplish what the first failed to do: make Korea a united, communist nation. It's an aspiration that has survived seventy-two years and two generational shifts in the world's only communist dynasty.
[The New York Review Of Books]
North Korea Is More Rational Than You Think
Zeeshan Aleem argues that Kim Jong Un is a rational leader, if you define rational as having a "fundamental survival instinct."
The smallness of the peninsula has a way of clarifying the high stakes of any war: Millions of people are vulnerable to being massacred by either side.
North Korea's leaders — including Kim Jong Un — aren't blind to this. In fact, they're exceptionally sensitive to it. They're very mindful of the fact that their ability to inflict huge damage on South Korea with great speed is a big deterrent to any major US strike against the North. And because of that, they know they have a bit of leeway in taking provocative action against South Korea and the US.
Nobody actually wants to go to war, so North Korea gets away with a lot of bad behavior.
North Korea's acts of belligerence aren't insane outbursts, but deliberate gestures grounded in careful observations about how the outside world responds to it.
If you accept this argument, Trump's posturing is quite a bit more alarming and disquieting than Kim's.
[Vox]
Can Congress Stop Trump From Launching A Nuclear Attack On North Korea?
If you're hoping that Congress will save us from an unhinged Trump singlehandedly initiating nuclear annihilation for much of the planet, well, it probably won't happen. Amber Phillips points out that curtailing the president's unilateral power to launch a nuclear attack messes with the game theory of nuclear deterrence.
The whole reason the president can launch a nuclear strike without Congress's approval is to let other nuclear war powers know that the United States means business.
It's a deterrent to North Korea's Kim Jong Un and the like. If they fire nuclear warheads at the United States (North Korea is getting closer to being able to do that sooner than experts had predicted), they know that in a matter of minutes, U.S. nuclear warheads could be soaring over to them.
If Congress trims the president's immediate launch-strike power, it could be very, very, dangerous for the United States, [former deputy assistant secretary of defense Rebecca] Hersman said.
"[Nuclear weapons] exist to protect us from catastrophe. Their role in the world is to prevent their use and to deter their use," Hersman said. "You need the president to be able to react responsibly and quickly."
The Alternative To Nuclear War Is A Revolution
Finally, a not-totally-bleak view: Eli Lake says America's best bet for taking out Kim is to help North Koreans break the hold of their totalitarian state and to fight for their own freedom.
Tom Malinowski, who served as President Barack Obama's assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, wrote in Politico in June that the U.S. should continue to flood North Korea with information…
One organization, known as No Chain, is run by North Korean defector and former dissident Jung Gwang-Il. No Chain sends helicopter drones with the portable players, along with content like South Korean soap operas, over the border into the country.
Malinowski told me that when he was at the State Department the U.S. government spent around $3 million a year to support similar kinds of organizations. The budget for these programs in the next year will be around $5 million. The U.S. should be spending at least 10 times as much on this. This effort should also include workshops for North Korean defectors on nonviolent conflict, similar to the training the U.S. State Department provided to Serbs before their citizens organized the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
To be sure, feeding information into North Korea is not a silver bullet. It's impossible to predict the timing of popular revolutions. But it is possible to predict the outcome: a revolution would prevent a catastrophic war.
