North Korea and Nuclear Weapons

1 NORTH KOREA AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Nonproliferation or Deterrence? Or Both?

Patrick Morgan

THIS CHAPTER offers reflections on three questions: How will a nuclear armed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) likely behave in the future? How will the United States, China, and the Republic of Korea (ROK) respond? What will all this mean for peace and stability in Northeast Asia? The approach to these questions involves merging aspects of deterrence, nonproliferation, and unification to grapple with three subjects: a summary of the present components of the North Korean problem, which continues to unfold; an exploration of how complicated really understanding that problem is; and a comparative assessment of the possible options today. This chapter is therefore not a plan for how to proceed but rather a probe to help facilitate the better development of a plan. Along the way, it reflects a continuing frustration about the potentially unstable, dangerous, highly costly situation.

As an enduring and almost continually dangerous conflict—involving a government regularly at odds with a good deal of the world—the North Korean conflict/problem has had no equal in its staying power in international politics since the end of World War II. Since its inception, the standard approach to the problem has been to particularly emphasize the DPRK military threat, a threat initially conventional and now becoming nuclear. The emphasis is increasingly on the nuclear threat, which naturally has highlighted the use of nonproliferation efforts and deterrence to deal with it.

The crux of the North’s threat is its leaders’ desire to rule the entire Korean Peninsula, linked to leadership that initially grew within a potent Stalinist perspective, which soon decayed and was reshaped into a blend of totalitarian communism with classic Korean elements. The result was a largely isolated state, political system, and culture preoccupied with eventually ruling Korea as a single nation, within a militaristic posture and with absolutist control. Unfortunately for its rulers, such an entity could not simply go its own way. It was impossible for them to fully isolate it from the disruptive geographic, political, economic, ideological, and strategic environments surrounding it from the start. Ignoring the world and being ignored by it was impossible; it was located in the wrong place for that. Thus, from the start its leaders felt required to be threatening and bellicose to survive. They still do because the basic elements of the status quo that developed on the peninsula then continue to be the ultimate threat it confronts today. After seventy years it remains, in many respects, the world’s least altered state and nation since its inception—a holdover, remnant, antique, and continuing failure in not fully certain ways operating at a not fully certain rate. It is necessarily isolated, self-centered, paranoid, and totalitarian as the only way it can sustain its survival, and then only in a perilous fashion.

The peril and uncertainty underscore its inability to decently compare with the continuing popularity of the ROK and its spectacular achievements. North Korea continues to blame its situation primarily on having to confront a United States bent on destroying it, when its fundamental problem long ago became that it has not been able to compete with the ROK and therefore is constantly at risk of disappearing. It needs to eliminate the ROK—and consistently dreads the alternative of being eliminated itself—by unification, a problem more serious than ever because it now lacks strong, durable, ideologically and culturally comfortable associates and allies. It cannot with certainty defend itself from, much less eliminate, its opponents, leaving it dependent on threats of deterrence by denial with inadequate military capabilities. Hence, its continued pursuit, for several decades, of nuclear weapons to replace the extended deterrence once provided by allied governments whose patience it has finally largely exhausted.

Today’s North Korea is so problematic and troublesome because its behavior continuously makes unification both vital and impossible and the division of the peninsula increasingly more unstable, dangerous, and unsettling.1 This is particularly the case because the North’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and other provocative actions, seems clearly meant not only to deter but to compel on the peninsula and, with respect to the United States, on a partly global scale. This has begun expanding the already inadequate military stability on the peninsula and surrounding area, where too many great powers’ interests have long been involved, and also threatens the viability of the global nonproliferation regime.

As a result, the underlying traditional deterrence structure, which for decades has effectively contained the Korean conflict and related great power frictions over what to do with and on the peninsula, is facing possibly serious erosion. This situation is therefore also displaying just how damaging deterrence can be, an aspect of it often underappreciated. Deterrence has long limited (though not halted) North Korean provocations and contained the long-standing wishes of several great powers to forcefully rearrange the peninsula to suit their interests, but it has begun to fail. North Korean deterrence remains rooted in a seemingly eternal preoccupation with fear that the ROK and the United States are poised to attack. And the allies’ deterrence efforts have in turn deeply frustrated North Korea. But North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear deterrence, as various governments have anticipated, has now heightened prospects of

provoking standing military forces into more reciprocal alerts and military improvements, and reciprocal responses to those improvements;
promoting preemptive strike plans and deployments, increasing the potential instability within long-standing reciprocal deterrence postures in and around the peninsula;
heightening existing political conflicts—one way that deterrence employed to dampen conflicts can actually further provoke them;
demonstrating how, in wrecking nonproliferation efforts via almost intrinsic conflict, deterrence can at times reinforce, as well as contain, the interactive military efforts it readily provokes, readily enhancing retreats from nonproliferation; and
culminating in fears the opponent will soon achieve the capacity to bully via nuclear weapons, as North Korea has been seeking.

Nuclear weapons and the pursuit of nuclear deterrence also increase possibilities that the nuclear buildups will make it almost impossible to mount effective efforts later on to abolish them because of related fears of cheating, resulting inspections that could undermine one’s deterrence capabilities, and the retention of advanced capabilities for potential breakouts or rapid remilitarization on both sides. This is what Pyongyang’s relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons is exacerbating, partly in response to continued US extended deterrence for South Korea and Japan.

A Related and Often Underappreciated Failure

Often ignored in analyses of security situations is the role of the overarching global political structure and its overall level of conflict, which often heavily influences lower-level systems’ stability and security. In effect, the security situation in many lower-level systems is significantly linked to and affected by the level and effectiveness of international system management. This has been a glaring factor in Northeast Asia’s security situation for years. Often much has depended on how the great powers involved are getting along politically and in their own security relations, not just there but globally.

For years the regional situation was hugely shaped by Cold War great power conflicts, which drove military buildups by the two Koreas via Chinese, Soviet, and American arms and other military support. It has been molded by Chinese fears of American forces ending up along the Korean border if unification occurs, by Chinese fears about any American ballistic missile defenses of Japan and the ROK, and by the deteriorating US-Russia relationship now.2 Achieving and maintaining stability in East Asia can be more or less managed to a degree by international management arrangements, such as

competitive management (e.g., balance-of-power arrangements);
unipolar management;
international norms and institutions—when (a) the regional system is not of vital concern to the major global powers, and (b) the norms and institutions are respected and often upheld by states in general; and
collective actor management (such as by the United Nations [UN])—particularly on security matters such as deterrence, weapon proliferation, local and internal wars, and so forth.

When these conditions are not available or effective in a lower-level system, and nothing else suitable is either, a regional system could well have its security and stability, temporarily or longer, provided by a dominant regional actor that has sufficient military power.3 While some actors applaud such an overseer, it is common for others to avoid that situation if possible.

What is taking place currently in Northeast Asia is (1) clashes between great powers active in the regional system are resurging, which threatens to reduce the regional-level cooperation on containing/repressing North Korea, and (2) North Korea is about to assemble enough nuclear weapons to significantly alter Northeast Asia’s security and international political systems. The possible consequences:

further nuclear proliferation efforts within the region;
reductions in the effectiveness or credibility of US extended deterrence;
military action to repress North Korea’s nuclear weapon program; and
re-creation of the prior regional pattern of largely repressive regimes versus democracies on regional security matters, North Korea, and so forth.

The North Korean nuclear weapon problem began to emerge several decades ago as the icing on this particular regional cake. It has been a remarkably durable problem, despite serious efforts to slow or erase it. Possible solutions proposed and pursued have included the following:

Unification: It involves efforts that have never come close to success—whether by both Koreas, each separately, or outsiders. Approaches employed have included military victory, negotiations, military threats and political pressure, rewards and benefits, sanctions, subversion, endless propaganda, assassination, and vilification.
Arms control / arms reduction: The same is true of efforts to negotiate agreements to limit armaments, retract dangerous military postures, or lower tensions along land and sea borders. This is particularly true of the pursuit of a major settlement directly on the nuclear weapon problem—those efforts have also been fruitless. The two Koreas remain among the most heavily armed and postured states for major fighting in the world, continuously upgrading their military capabilities.4
Economic interaction: Trade, joint economic enterprises, joint economic development efforts, interactions on developing peaceful nuclear energy capabilities, and the like have been minimal in scale and effect, despite high expectations. They are at an especially low point now.
Cultural, intellectual, and familial interchanges: As we know, these are limited, often interrupted, and have had no real effect in promoting anything like unification or large-scale celebrations of common elements of the two societies.

Why have these efforts failed? The most compelling explanation is that, for the parties involved, especially the North, it has always seemed likely that mounting a decisive effort to end the problem would turn out to be too costly, too destabilizing, or both. A supposedly decisive military effort would, it has been assumed, likely be of devastating proportions and quite possibly fail anyway, or be successful but terribly destructive. Avoiding a decisive effort to end the problem has persisted despite consistent North Korean threats to seriously disrupt existing stability (of sorts), and the North has secured little outside support politically, economically, or ethically for its behavior. Thus, the problem persists despite North Korea remaining a seriously threatening, dangerous, harmful, and costly flaw in the international system for the ROK, its neighbors, and the United States.

This limited level of effort and lack of success is a situation that might be considered very surprising because in the past two decades the North has become steadily more threatening and dangerous by developing nuclear weapons and systems for their use at ever-greater distances and because of its extensive participation in proliferation efforts, its dangerous military provocations over the years (particularly recently), its continuing human rights violations, and its flow of refugees. Of course, the most consequential problem has been its nuclear weapons effort.

North Korea is closing in on operationalizing a small nuclear weapon force. Estimates of its nuclear weapons now range as high as ten to twenty.5 Some analysts fear that its dependence on nuclear weapons is so great that it would readily resort to first use in a serious conflict. Others believe that the North is close to miniaturizing those weapons so its latest missiles, with a potential range of up to nine thousand kilometers, would be able to strike parts of the United States. This is bringing Pyongyang closer to achieving a long-standing military objective and a resulting compromise by and with the United States.

Deterrence and Nonproliferation

The most significant responses to this have been deterrence and the pursuit of nonproliferation via arms control. Deterrence has been extensively employed for decades by both sides and key associates. By all appearances, it has worked, often under very difficult conditions, to sustain the basic stability of the political and military situation or, rather, to sustain reasonable stability in spite of that situation. Even with periodically intense confrontations, the large military forces poised for action, the North’s periodic belligerence, and other threatening behavior from both sides, Korea has experienced no outright extended warfare for over sixty years. Deterrence has been consistently practiced by the ROK and United States, and by North Korea through constant efforts to deter the United States and South Korea originally with support from the Soviet Union during the Cold War and with deterrence from China since 1950, which may now be of somewhat dubious reliability.

However, all this has not been particularly satisfactory. Deterrence is about successfully discouraging very harmful, particularly violent behavior by an opponent and, ideally, keeping it from being even seriously contemplated. But North Korea has nevertheless clearly felt that it faces the constant threat of attack by US and ROK forces, which remain on fairly high alert—poised to rapidly multiply if necessary. This is even more the case for the ROK and United States. They still face the constant threat of a serious attack by the North, a threat displayed by very large DPRK forces on high alert along the border and by repeated small military attacks over the years.

Much more disturbing for the allies is the failure of deterrence with regard to nuclear weapon proliferation by North Korea in and through its dealings with countries such as Iran, Pakistan, China, and Russia. Deterrence of nuclear proliferation by North Korea as proliferator or recipient has also regularly failed. It is now close to achieving the status of a nuclear power without any official international designation as one. It is increasingly dependent on asserting that the stature and status is needed to sustain regime legitimacy in the face of failures for years to construct durable and satisfying alternatives for upholding regime survival. Its links to states such as Iran and Pakistan continue facilitating those participants’ development of nuclear weapons, despite increased efforts over the years by other states to prevent this from happening.6

On the North Korean problem, therefore, deterrence has continued to fail at every level except preventing outright war. When suitably employed with appropriate forces, ROK-US deterrence only limits actual fighting even under threatening circumstances. For the ROK, the United States, and the international community, deterrence has not prevented the North from developing nuclear weapons and related delivery systems, maintaining huge forces close to the border to threaten Seoul and other valuable areas, promoting nuclear proliferation in arrangements with other states, and periodically mounting brief attacks on South Korea. In turn, North Korean deterrence has not prevented serious sanctions against it and retaliatory measures in response to its own, the allies’ intense training regularly for major war against it, the crippling of its financial and other commercial activities abroad, and the allies exploiting the North’s behavior to further limit its interactions with the outside world.

The rising fear now is that as a full-fledged nuclear power the North will have enhanced deterrence and compellence capacities, making it more difficult to contain. In fact, the fear is that such capacities could enhance its overall political and military status internationally, resulting in greater chances for survival (the regime’s ultimate goal), more normal treatment by outsiders, greater license for very abnormal conduct internationally and domestically, and more regime legitimacy at home and abroad.

Meanwhile, its military provocations have led to a US-ROK agreement to jointly respond to future ones in a rapid military fashion. China has become more serious about the North’s behavior and has limited its support both economically and politically. The UN has undertaken major efforts to condemn the human rights situation in the North. The US relationship with the North is minimal, and North-South relations are at a very low ebb. The fear is that its nuclear weapons will lead the North to do things that generate allied military responses through serious fighting.

The North’s nuclear weapon program is also escalating concern because of the rising disarray that has developed there, leading to the greatest speculation about a possible regime collapse in decades. This can readily provoke greater concern in the area and the United States about prospects for continued regional stability and more concern about what to do when and how under these circumstances. It has already led to discussions (privately) about who will do what under various possible circumstances and to some actual planning along those lines. But little is actually being done. Aside from Japan and Russia strengthening relations with the North because their international or domestic situations are not good at the moment, there is no evidence of plans for dealing with such a situation that could assuredly be implemented.

Naturally, there is considerable concern about, in an initial North Korean collapse, what happens to its nuclear weapons. If it is rapid, into whose hands would they fall? If it happens slowly, generating civil war, the fighting could possibly lead to their eventual use. In short, there is concern about reenacting the situation during the collapse of the Soviet Union, when numerous nuclear weapons fell into the hands of republics breaking away from the USSR. This is a sensible worry. There is similar concern about a possible parallel case arising in Pakistan because of the heightened conflict between the government and various terrorist movements. A related example is how other types of weapons of mass destruction have been used in Syria, inciting concerns about just who controls them.

A quite different aspect of North Korea’s nuclear weapon program is persistent South Korean inclinations to assume that a United States that could be directly attacked by North Korean nuclear weapons would not be willing to risk that by defending the ROK in another Korean War. In other words, US extended deterrence could lose credibility in both Koreas (and even Japan). More thinking along these lines could readily put greater strain on the alliance and maybe embolden the North. That sort of worry is the opposite of concern about a North Korean collapse; it envisions a serious deterioration in the alliance for quite different reasons.

Thus, this is the essence of the problem. First, the deterrence involved is not necessarily stable enough for comfort. The status quo may be too potentially destabilizing for Pyongyang—domestically and internationally—while its emerging nuclear-deterrence posture could soon be too threatening for continued allied confidence that existing stability in the region or on the peninsula will hold. On the other hand, North Korea must continue rejecting the nonproliferation regime and proceed further in building nuclear weapons, utilizing a network of associates for trading information, equipment, and technology on the various facets of nuclear weapon development, because it is dangerously short of viable alternatives.

Therefore, today’s stability—constructed and maintained at great cost over many decades by deterrence—is at risk of dissolving. The onset of this has been evident for some time, but it has been impossible to come up with satisfactory ways to shore up the available deterrence soon. And there is no consensus as to exactly what should replace it and how.

Things to Keep in Mind

With no clear route to better improving the situation, a number of relevant pieces of information should be kept in mind in coping with it. First, a number of states have obtained nuclear weapons despite strong objections from many others, particularly the original nuclear armed states that remain the most powerful. Yet no use of nuclear weapons has resulted. Proliferation is not an open door to the ready use of nuclear weapons, despite assertions it is or will be. North Korea may turn out to be containable and thus tolerable as a nuclear power, particularly if the great powers active in Northeast Asia decide how to improve their cooperative containment of Pyongyang.

Second, over the years a number of states have been interested in possibly obtaining nuclear weapons and, in some cases, have mounted significant efforts to build, buy, or otherwise acquire them. Yet there are only a small number of nuclear-armed states. Efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation have clearly had a considerable impact, and they have expanded recently with respect to Iran and North Korea. And a few states with nuclear weapons are now at least considering shedding them. So, North Korea’s nuclear weapons may not set off a rush to imitate it in neighboring states or others. Pressure to move in that direction will be significant but may be possible to keep contained.

A helpful factor is that nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence were significantly recessed for some time after the Cold War—with shrinking arsenals and few delivery vehicles, limited modernization efforts, and less planning for using such weapons. Thus, we know that can be done and how to do it. However, that depended primarily on the substantial progress in sharply containing international conflicts, and that aspect of international politics has been decaying recently. Pakistan has been the most intent on rapidly expanding and upgrading its nuclear arsenal, with India doing the same at a slower pace. Russia’s arsenal is being modernized and probably enlarged, while China’s is clearly modernizing and definitely enlarging as well. China was helpful on containing the North before but is of less assistance now. Israel’s recent nuclear weapon modernization has also hindered efforts to contain Pyongyang’s nuclear efforts. Thus, North Korea is pursuing nuclear power status in a climate more accommodative in several ways than earlier. Containment of proliferation is under disturbingly wider pressure, which is certainly worth worrying about.

Third, it is therefore more conceivable now that deployed nuclear forces of some other states will also be receiving more resources to grow, taking us backward. Nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence have clearly failed to fully halt nuclear proliferation and to promote continued reductions in nuclear arsenals. So has arms control, leading some adherents scrambling for ways to revive it. And campaigns to eliminate nuclear weapons have fallen on hard times.

Fourth, what happens when nuclear weapons arrive in a regional system? Obviously, nuclear weapons have so far been more useful for keeping the world safe from harm than inflicting it. Nuclear weapons have turned out better for gaining confidence in being safe than confidence in extracting benefits by making others feel unsafe, better at fending off the most severe military threats than far less dangerous ones posed by terrorists or other irritating but relatively modest opponents. Nuclear weapons are (much) better for a kind of defensive deterrence to protect ultimate valuables than for vigorous offensive uses under which they are more likely to draw a nuclear or other severe response (from the target or its extended-deterrence associate). A nuclear-armed North Korea may turn out to be deterred from attacks much more easily than expected.7

The fifth point that should be kept in mind raises interesting questions. North Korea is probably riding a weak horse if it wants to be able to behave like an expansive, compellence-oriented actor with nuclear weapons in hand. Probably only a very unusual actor, perhaps with a terribly impulsive or disturbed leader, would carry such behavior very far. Thus, we need to know, as best we can, why North Korea wants nuclear weapons. Do we know why North Korea pursues nuclear weapons so doggedly? There are certainly many reasons for seeking them, such as

to deter a seemingly very dangerous, powerful opponent;
to gain a capacity to respond in kind after a nuclear attack;
to practice compellence, dominating others elsewhere;
to display one’s power, even megalomaniacally;
to appease domestic citizens’ fears or desires;
to gain prestige at home or abroad;
to gain status abroad; or
to match others out of jealousy or a need for equal respect or to be treated equally.

Many of these are cited in explaining North Korea’s nuclear appetite, but no one claims to know, fully and for sure, which ones apply. Has the motivation been the same over time; is it the same now as before? Not knowing is an important gap because knowing could be the key to understanding and anticipating the North’s behavior and how best to pursue altering its actions.

Has the North’s motivation been the same over time? There have been various explanations offered over the years, including the following:

fear of attack by the United States
a desire to offset the ROK’s fundamental military superiority
a need to sustain the national image—among Koreans, and elsewhere
a tendency to see nuclear weapons as essential to regime legitimacy
a belief that the United States would not fight for the ROK if faced with a DPRK nuclear threat;
notice of the cuts in US military spending now or pending.

With such an array of possibilities, can we effectively tackle the North Korean nuclear weapon problem without knowing what the real answer(s) is (are)?

Envisioning Options

The first, and best, option is Korean unification. By far the most desirable solution to the North Korean nuclear weapon problem would be the onset of unification, which can only work under the aegis of the ROK as having by far the stronger, more advanced society, economy, and political system. It also has a far more cosmopolitan society, is far more accustomed to the world, and is more internationally acceptable. It can far more readily carry the load of unification. Yet unification remains anything but imminent or even possible.

At present it is the only plausible way the North’s nuclear weapons might be eliminated without considerable violence, even catastrophe. The Park Geun-hye government has indicated a unified Korea would not keep those or any other nuclear weapons. It has also been hard at work improving relations with China, and no doubt would do the same with Russia during a unification effort. On the other hand, a unified Korea would remain a formidable state militarily, with masses of equipment, highly trained military personnel, and an impressive navy. Hopefully, it would remain a formidable military power facing no serious military threats or military opponents to confront.

Under those circumstances, the US military presence would likely be reduced—as it is, some analysts have long wondered why significant US forces are necessary there. The alliance would remain, with close contacts between the two military forces and governments. The hub of the American regional military presence would be even more clearly located in Japan than now. Virtually everyone would find that security situation much more tolerable, unless China became steadily more troublesome. The North Korean nuclear weapon problem would be resolved, and the problem of the Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea would dissolve, as would the burden of sustaining or confronting the North. China would probably remain a concern but would itself be more relaxed about the security situation with a reduced US military presence, unless serious China-Japan friction increased the US presence instead. The more contested area between the United States and China would be the South China Sea and related places instead of Korea.8

The problem with this as the best option on the North Korean nuclear weapon problem is that while unification could be fine, we have no serious grasp of when, where, and how it would begin to emerge. It could take years to even begin and then might drag on for some time. For instance, analysts have suggested that under various circumstances a serious unification effort could engender various clashes in Northeast Asia—along the China-Korea border, among military factions in North Korea—making for a very dangerous situation.9 The US and East Asian governments have been speculating about this for years, individually and in quiet interactions, indicating to each other what they would like to see happen under various circumstances and what they would disapprove of if it started. This is a huge improvement because it is vital that the participants have a good understanding, hopefully an agreement, about who expects to take what steps under what circumstances with what intentions. But it is still speculative.

A second option is to find creative ways to exploit the more relaxed situation now in the North Korean economy. The regime has allowed more private commerce in hopes of improving productivity and raising living standards, and people turned rapidly toward exploiting the emerging markets. The regime has not extended this very far in international economic interactions, but this policy would be difficult to continue over time. When it first relaxed its management of the domestic economy (under Kim Jong-il), people rapidly carried things much further and faster than the regime expected, and this is likely to happen again.

Alongside this, the ROK would do best to emphasize, in both public and private ways, how a unification effort would include establishing or retaining conditions in which North Korean elites continue to have good living conditions, access to their foreign funds, significant roles in government institutions, freedom from incarceration, and so forth. Seoul would also stress how careful consideration would be given to conducting the merger with limited disruptions throughout Korea in the face of plans to generate an economic surge for the reorganization and alteration of the North’s society.

This is a version of the well-known, often championed option of North and South growing together gradually and peacefully (and therefore fairly cheaply—a serious ROK consideration). A major pursuit of recent ROK leaders and governments, it has not gained much traction even with the relevant great powers. The trouble with this path is obvious. Introducing major changes across the board, even if slowly and thoughtfully, for unification essentially from the ground up would involve transforming the most centralized, rigidly structured, and tightly controlled society in the world. Even in East Germany after the Cold War that was very difficult to do, and it did not involve dismantling nuclear weapons and related institutions there.

A third option already being pursued is tracking the North Korean nuclear weapon program so minutely that early warning of a DPRK nuclear attack would allow attacking the weapons first or destroying them after launched. This means accepting the existence of the North’s nuclear weapons, if unavoidable, but nullifying their capacity to do serious harm. Both preemptive strikes and defensive systems are to be employed against what remains a primitive nuclear weapon system, making the North Korean threat easier to tolerate for the ROK, Japan, and the United States.

There are several difficulties here. One is that various North Korea attacks in the past were not detected in advance. Major steps in its nuclear weapons occurred without being initially detected by the ROK or the United States. Occasional intrusions by North Korean forces have occurred at first without detection. Some missiles have been test-fired without advance detection. Thus, the threat of a North Korean nuclear attack not being detected in time will likely remain for some years to come.

Another difficulty—somewhat overrated—is that Seoul is so close to North Korea that the North’s conventional forces have an ideal target for inflicting devastating harm—really a giant hostage for curbing South Korean military activities. While such damage is possible, it would require almost inconceivable US and ROK military incompetence. Long ago they should have detected every North Korean position within reach of Seoul: Every military storage area, every road and path that could be taken, and every communications resource have long since been targeted by the South and the Americans. When the North poised large military forces along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), it was the North that most laid itself open to a crushing blow. In an age of pinpoint electronic surveillance, multitasking satellites, aerial reconnaissance down to millimeters, extensively precise military equipment, and an opponent facing a massive, widespread, very heavily constructed capital city of considerable depth, North Korea, positioned just above the DMZ, is a truly static and vulnerable target far more than it is a potential hostage holder. The allied forces not having taken advantage of this in their plans, training, and preparations is inconceivable.

The final option is to again hold negotiations, presumably with the usual cast of participants.10 The North has been suggesting that it is open to this, and various analysts support it. The pluses and minuses are well known because of the lengthy record of negotiations held and abandoned, agreements reached and breached, as well as charges that just holding negotiations strengthens the North’s position and invites imitation of it by others who want nuclear weapons. However, if the Iranian nuclear negotiations continue to be viewed as successful, the pressure to try this with North Korea will escalate.

If none of the above options turn out to apply to and basically resolve the problems, there is one other possibility that certainly seems plausible and would solve the challenges discussed in this chapter. But it would not be very attractive and would only occasionally and partially be considered by analysts and others. What about creating a unified Korea established in part around a nuclear arsenal that is the product of both parties? It could use Korean nationalism to pull the divided nation together, a way to settle the overall unification problem and the nuclear weapon problem together. And doing so would be a long step toward relaxing the age-old shrimp-and-whale problem for the Korean nation in its neighborhood.

But this would be awful in terms of the nuclear proliferation problem and the arms control efforts that continue seeking to keep it from flourishing. It would deeply provoke Japan, possibly into developing indigenous nuclear weapons, and perhaps incite nuclear proliferation elsewhere as well. The development would not sit at all well with the United States and would surely not be welcomed by China and Russia.

Conclusion

This is only an outline of the North Korean nuclear weapon problem. However, clearly it is deeply entangled with the other great Korean problem—unification. Both can seem impossible to resolve, partly because they are usually discussed, analyzed, and pursued as separate and very complicated problems. In fact, each is a central component of what is needed to resolve the other, not only with respect to the two Koreas but also in terms of the interests and objectives of the great powers involved, plus other international actors such as the UN and those associated with the many variants of arms control.

This is a useful way of thinking about the North Korean nuclear weapon problem. Numerous countries have been interested in nuclear weapons, but very few have developed them as far as Pyongyang has. The failure of Korean unification to make much progress, coupled with the nuclear weapon problem, has become an ever more important barrier to maintaining a suitable and stable regional security structure in Northeast Asia. Correcting this is one of the most important necessities in international politics now. Rethinking the options for doing it needs both further study and serious interstate evaluation.

Notes

1. Given its achievements, unification is, for the ROK, far less vital. There unification is often perceived as far as too costly to be worth pursuing, even though it is the preferred outcome.

2. This is not an automatic phenomenon. For example, the major powers’ frictions did not apparently deeply affect their ability to cooperate in negotiating the problem of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

3. An example would be Australia in Southeast Asia. Another was Egypt among several Arab states for a good many years. China is often seen now as pursuing this role in several regional systems.

4. The Military Balance: 2016 indicates that the North Korean armed forces number well over one million, while the ROK’s are over six hundred thousand but are much better armed. International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), The Military Balance: 2016 (London: Routledge, 2016), 264–70. A parallel assessment is Bruce Bechtol Jr., North Korea and Regional Security in the Kim Jong-un Era: A New International Security Dilemma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 28–29.

5. The U.S.-Korea Institute has predicted that North Korea will soon have twenty nuclear weapons, and some Chinese experts have put the number as already at twenty or more. See IISS, Strategic Survey 2015 (Oxon: Routledge, 2015), 367–68.

6. The link between Iran and North Korea on development of nuclear weapons may subside now that Iran is under close watch about suppressing its nuclear weapon program.

7. For a discussion of how Kim Jong-un would likely behave in a serious confrontation with the ROK and the United States and how the allies could promote careful behavior on his part, see Michael D. Cohen’s chapter in this volume.

8. The exception in US-China relations would be Taiwan.

9. An example of a pessimistic view on soon pursuing unification efforts, lest it be too destabilizing, is Bernard J. Brister, “Be Careful What You Wish For,” International Journal of Korean Studies 18 (Fall/Winter 2014): 26–52.

10. This option is always being promoted, is often considered very unlikely to work, and may soon be back on the table. See, for example, Leon V. Sigal, “Getting What We Need with North Korea,” Arms Control Today (April 2016): 8–13.