IN 2017 THE US NEED TO REMAIN A PACIFIC POWER BECAME STARKLY illustrated by open threats from a nuclear-armed North Korea not only on other Asian countries, but also on American territory. Military treaties demand the United States protects Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea, and to contain danger to US territory it is best to tackle it at source. The North Korean crisis has drawn in China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States. During 2017 North Korea carried out a series of long-range missile tests that it claimed were designed for a nuclear strike on the American mainland. Three US aircraft carrier groups were deployed to the Pacific. The UN imposed yet more sanctions on North Korea, backed by the nation’s traditional allies China and Russia, indicating further isolation of the regime.
Yes, much of this was bluster and rhetoric. Comparisons with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis were misplaced because Cuba is just over a hundred miles from Florida, while North Korea is fifty-five hundred miles from the American West Coast and two thousand miles from Guam, the US Pacific island with military bases, threatened by Pyongyang. So far North Korea has only proven that it had some kind of nuclear weapon and a missile that in August 2017 flew for forty-five minutes, reaching a height of twenty-three hundred miles and traveling for a distance of more than six hundred miles. Without a doubt, North Korea is working hard and fast on improving its arsenal. But it knows that if it ever did directly threaten Japan, South Korea, or the United States, the Kim family regime would be unlikely to survive.
“One would hope that the North Korean crisis is moving away from bluster and counter-bluster, and toward realism,” writes Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The risk is not today’s potential North Korean nuclear threat. It is what can so easily evolve over the coming decade: An open-ended nuclear arms race in northeast Asia with players whose actions and level of restraint in any given crisis is far harder to predict than the impact of mutual assured destruction in the Cold War.”
North Korea is controlled by an outdated, insular, Stalinist-style family dynasty, currently run by Kim Jong-un, who is only in his thirties. He inherited the mantle from his father, Kim Jong-il, son of the country’s revered and canny founder, Kim Il-sung, who started the Korean War. In the strange way in which North Korea operates, Kim Il-sung’s 105th birthday was celebrated in April 2017 because, within its mythology, the Great Leader, as he was known, was named after his death as the “eternal president”—meaning he is, in the mind of the nation, still alive.
The country is flanked to the north by its ally China, and to the south by its enemy South Korea, across the demilitarized zone agreed upon in 1953 to stop the fighting. Technically, the two sides remain at war. To the east North Korea shares a short border with Russia. On the map, the country resembles an upside-down ankle and shoe. The Kim family has maintained a skillful grip over North Korea’s twenty-five million people by repressing, threatening, and isolating them. Borders are kept closed. Martial music, slogans, and worship of the regime are embedded in citizens from birth. Television, radio, and the Internet are highly restricted. Some 150,000 labor camp prisoners live in a Soviet-style gulag system, facing starvation, torture, rape, and execution, and the threat of being sent to such a camp hangs over every citizen. No one is exempt. To strengthen his grip on power, Kim Jong-un executed his own uncle in 2014, together with an aunt and many other relatives. During a visit in 1994, I interviewed a deputy minister who handled energy and nuclear issues. I tried to contact him later, and was told he had “moved job.” I later learned he had been executed by firing squad.
By sealing itself off and instilling in people the idea that they lead perfect lives, the Kim family has created a bizarre social laboratory. North Koreans are motivated, bright, and disciplined. They have to be to outfox the regime and survive. Those I have met are funny, clever, and quick-thinking. The minders allocated to me during two visits in the mid-1990s—when the United States was drawing up plans for air and missile strikes in order to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons—had been educated at the best universities in Beijing and Moscow. Conversation flowed, jokes were cracked, beer was drunk, and stories were told of wild times, difficult spouses, and sexual infidelities. Nothing, it seemed, was off the table—except, of course, scrutiny of the regime.
On my first visit, posing as tourists, we filmed lunchtime airstrike drills with sirens wailing and crowds rushing toward the metro stations. That evening, we were taken to the monument celebrating the North Korean ideology known as Juche; there a fake red flame symbolizing the self-reliance that glues the country together flared up from a tall, thin tower. It was devised by Kim Il-sung as an image of absolute loyalty, a nation blessed with happiness under the guidance of the Great Leader. We were there at dusk, and a full moon appeared in a clear sky, untainted by city lights because in Pyongyang there weren’t many.
One guide said, “The moon is so big and beautiful and it’s so close, I feel I could touch it.”
“Yes,” I answered. “And to think people have walked on it.”
The guide stiffened and said, “You are wrong. No man has ever walked on the moon. Under the guidance of our Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will be the first nation to send a man to the moon.”
You could cut the dusk atmosphere with a knife, so I said, “Oh. Maybe I’m wrong. I thought people had.” The next day we toured Pyongyang’s main maternity hospital, which had only one baby and not a pregnant woman in sight, and a disabled center with no one who was disabled.
My second visit, a few months later, came in the summer of 1994 after Kim Il-sung had died. I led an official BBC film crew, or delegation as they called it, bearing a gift from the chairman with the BBC coat of arms and the inscription “Nation shall speak peace unto Nation,” and got into a similarly confused conversation again. This time we were in the dreary and soul-stripping Koryo Hotel, where everything was gray or dirty maroon. We were laughing over beers, and in the background came piped-in music, the North Korean version of Wagneresque jingoistic songs. We had a different set of guides from another department, but they had an equally sharp wit, this time ripping into South Korean men for being ugly and impotent, which was why all the beautiful women sought sanctuary in the North. Gradually, seeping into the background noise came the Beatles song “Hey Jude,” wafting over from another group. Bulgarian engineers, sick of the patriotic music, had turned on a CD player.
Our guides were both called Kim. They knew the song, and had even sung it in karaoke in Beijing. I said, “I wonder what music the Beatles would be doing now if they hadn’t split up.”
Suddenly we were back in a moon-landing situation. Silence ensued as they took in the apparent enormity of what I had said and processed what to do. Frowns. Nervousness. Laser-like glares. Whispered discussion. Eventually one stood up; he was thin, bespectacled, in his early thirties, wearing a tight, badly fitting dark blue suit. “Mr. Humphrey, could I have a private word?”
We walked to the edge of the bar area, round the table where the Bulgarians were tapping their feet to “So let it out and let it in, hey Jude, begin. …” We stopped on steps leading down to the main foyer. “Mr. Humphrey, I must correct you. The Beatles have not split up. They are coming here to perform for our Great Leader Kim Il-sung—” He hesitated, adjusting his spectacles, his face creased with the contradiction of what he had just said. The country was in mourning for the Great Leader who had just died, while a rock band that no longer existed was on its way to perform for him. The man fixed me with an even harsher gaze. But his tone changed completely. “Listen, we don’t know which fuckers are watching us. You’ve got to help us, okay? We let you in as a test, and if that test fails it’s kaput for us.”
“Moon landing, Beatles, anything else?” I said quietly.
“Too much with those fuckers. Too much. You never fucking know. No-one does.” He put a shaking hand on my elbow to guide me back.
By mid-2017 Kim Jong-un was intensifying his missile tests, and US president Donald Trump declared his patience had run out and that the only good outcome would be North Korea’s capitulation. Air strikes could lead to a nuclear war. At another level, the sudden collapse of the regime, advocated by many in the West, could be catastrophic. Similar scenarios had unfolded in the early twenty-first century in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine: a familiar pattern of false jubilation from the West, then reality, then bloodshed and division. North Korea had brought the world to the brink of war before, most seriously in 1994, when President Bill Clinton drew up detailed strike plans. Since then, however, none of the major regional powers could agree on how to handle the disintegration of the North Korean regime.
Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 many believed that Britain, the United States, and others had drawn up a plan on how to rebuild Iraq and had anticipated scenarios so as not to be caught by surprise. But they had not, and there is little evidence of lessons learned should Trump carry out his threat to destroy the regime. North Korea not only threatens US interests in the Asia-Pacific but now, with its missiles, has openly warned that it intends to attack the homeland.. This is far too dangerous a place for us not to have a plan.
With numerous weapons tests dating back to 2006, North Korea has been slowly acquiring the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead over long distances. The United States has been caught like a rabbit in headlights, uncertain how to stop it. While America could intervene in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, similar action in North Korea would be fraught with danger, risking an attack on the South Korean capital, Seoul. There is a fear that any strike would be met with a barrage on Seoul from the hundreds of artillery guns that North Korea keeps across the border. Estimates of their firing ability vary from half a million shells in an hour, destroying Seoul, to only obliterating an area that reaches the northern suburbs. There would be a high risk, too, of shells carrying the chemical nerve agents VX and sarin, of which North Korea has plentiful stockpiles. Much of North Korea’s equipment would not work; in fact, military estimates believe that up to one-fourth of its weaponry would fail. But it could still cause a high level of civilian casualties.
“North Korea is a failing state,” Bruce W. Bennett, who has been advocating that a detailed plan be drawn up, told me. “Its government could collapse in the coming months or years, causing an immense humanitarian disaster and potentially other, even more serious consequences. This is not a stable government. The more I researched, the more frightened I became.”
One scenario Bennett examined in his 2014 RAND Corporation report Preparing for the Possibility of a North Korean Collapse was the assassination of Kim Jong-un by a rival faction, which could propel North Korea toward civil war. Within hours of trouble breaking out, four emergency elements would need to be handled by international powers.
First, Bennett expected refugees to head both north and south. To prevent a human flood, humanitarian aid would have to be delivered swiftly and in plentiful supply throughout the country. The second emergency measure would be to neutralize North Korea’s air defense system; this would require military intervention agreed upon by China, South Korea, and the United States. Each hour taken to arrange it would worsen the humanitarian crisis. The third measure would be Beijing insisting on a buffer zone inside North Korea’s northern border, perhaps as deep as thirty miles, where its troops would be deployed. South Korea, which views the North as Korean sovereign territory, would have to agree. And finally, North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction would have to be secured quickly to prevent them falling into the hands of a terrorist organization or a North Korean faction that might use them.
In April 2013 the US Naval War College war-gamed a North Korean scenario, some results of which have been declassified. The game was conducted in a theater resembling the Korean Peninsula with the rivals code-named North and South Brown Lands. It involved three hundred people who played out a collapse of North Korea, either through intervention (as in Iraq in 2003) or through internal regime overthrow (as in Egypt in 2011). Among the participants were Army chief of staff Ray Odierno and his vice chief, John Campbell, both veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns, knowledgeable about hostile occupation and insurgencies. The scenario rapidly brought opposing Asian powers head-to-head because of North Korea’s geographical position bordering China, Russia, and South Korea, with US bases in Japan just across the sea to its east. It was worrying that the four governments had no agreed-upon formula for how to contain any collapse.
“There is not a great deal of planning on this,” the college’s North Korea expert, Terence Roehrig, told me. “It’s a delicate issue because planning for a collapse means you may be interested in encouraging one, and that could be diplomatically problematic.”
What the war game found made for uncomfortable reading. It would take ninety thousand troops fifty-six days to secure North Korea’s nuclear materials. In that time, Kim’s fracturing regime could distribute weapons-grade material to terrorist groups and rogue states around the world. The North Korean military would be expected to fight to keep control of their regions, status, salaries, and pensions, because the officers and party elite would be aware of the punitive measures the United States took against the Iraqi Army by summarily dissolving it. Rivalry in North Korea would be regional because it does not suffer the same ethnic and religious divisions as Iraq, and South Korea, not the United States, would most likely be the leading military force.
A prevailing view in Washington, DC, has been that China could be allowed to secure the nuclear weapons, given that the key North Korean nuclear installation at Yongbyon is only eighty miles from the Chinese border. Even so, there would need to be agreement. The fractious US political establishment would be divided. Japan would be tense and suspicious. South Korea would feel vulnerable.
There would be an emotionally charged reaction from Western democracies as revelations about concentration camps, starvation, and state cruelty emerged on twenty-four-hour news networks, creating a clash of interests between what would be needed for stability and a popular demand for instant action. As North Korea’s ally, China would not come out of this well, and there would be demands that it should be held accountable for supporting such a barbaric regime. Similar responses would feed out toward other governments, such as Pakistan and Russia, that have aided and abetted North Korea.
Even if the immediate crisis were handled as well as could be, China, South Korea, and the United States would jointly have to settle on a new government framework for the Korean Peninsula. Beijing and Washington would project their competing national interests, while Seoul would decide if it wanted full German-style unification and, if so, how to pay for it. There would also be the question of who in North Korea should be punished, and which officials should keep their jobs to hold institutions together. Who should lead the transition? Neither Beijing nor Washington has a good track record in this area. China remains stained by Cambodia’s Pol Pot and North Korea itself; The United States is bruised by Iraq. And the European Union has become too weak to have any impact.
A temporary arrangement could be a new partition of the North, in which Seoul would control the southern area of Kim Jong-un’s old territory while Beijing handled the area closer to its border. Pyongyang would become a shared administrative center, and there would be a timetable for Chinese withdrawal. Candidates for government would be drawn from factions within the North, who would bring to the new government their networks and knowledge of power, and from the diaspora in the South, who would deliver an understanding of good governance and trade. Far from perfect, such a partition would usher in a transitional era during which everyone could get used to the new landscape.
Bennett published another RAND Corporation report in 2017 pointing out that a key number of military and party officials in the North would have to be won over if Korean unification was to work. “North Korean elites likely need to feel that unification will be good for them, or at least not unacceptably bad,” he explains.99 The measures would include maintaining status, wealth, and security for families—exactly what the United States failed to do in Iraq, where the disbanding of the army and excluding elites from the ruling Baath Party fueled the insurgency.
The psychology itself would be challenging enough, taking people embedded in North Korea’s warped ideology and switching their mindset to one of understanding and trusting South Korea and the United States. But it may be more acceptable to China, which categorizes such a tactic as “nonpeaceful measures” whereby sanctions or a state of siege prompt high-level defections. This is how Beijing eventually fell to Mao Zedong’s communist army in 1949, and an option that it retains for eventual unification with Taiwan.
Scenarios on the Korean Peninsula pose far more danger than Beijing’s operations in the South China Sea, raising a familiar question: Why would the United States object to the Chinese military occupying a handful of remote uninhabited islands when Beijing and Washington need to work together on the Korean Peninsula and a myriad of other issues? In his January 2017 handover, President Barack Obama warned Trump that North Korea and its missiles would be his top national security threat. North Korea’s missile program first became a threat in the 1990s, and there were even reports (never confirmed) that it was being designed by a team of rogue Soviet scientists laid off after the collapse of communism.100 Pakistani involvement is well-documented.101
In its more than twenty missile tests during 2017, North Korea claimed to have achieved its aim of designing a missile and nuclear warhead that could reach Washington D.C. It even hinted at carrying out an atmospheric nuclear missile test over the Pacific Ocean. US attempts to pressure China into stopping North Korea had yielded little during this period of heightened tension, and North Korea appeared determined to keep going until it had the nuclear deterrent it thought it needed. North Korean officials frequently cited the examples of Iraq, Libya and Ukraine as countries that had forfeited their nuclear weapons programs only to be invaded by foreign powers.
BY EARLY 2018, exasperated at the stalled diplomatic process, the US had drawn up detailed plans for special forces operations against nuclear facilities in North Korea. Against the Dystopian option of nuclear war and/or the destruction of Seoul in the first hours of any war, the Pentagon was beginning to accept that a forensic strike might be the least worst option available. If it were fast, it might also persuade Kim Jung-un to surrender his nuclear weapons.
By September 2017, with the increased North Korean missile testing, South Korea deployed the US anti-missile defense system, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. The weapons system is designed to intercept and destroy a missile on its descent to a target. This went some way to allay domestic fears about a North Korean missile strike, but it caused friction with China that viewed it as an unnecessary hostile act.
More significantly, defense analysts had concluded there was a real possibility that it might not work. The Obama administration had concluded that the traditional system of the destruction of one missile by another missile in midair, like a bullet hitting a bullet, gave no security guarantee.102 Some tests had shown a more than fifty percent failure rate, and that was in noncombat conditions.103 Three years earlier, Obama had ordered the stepping up of countermeasures against Pyongyang’s missile program by using cyberstrikes with the aim of causing a launch to fail in its opening seconds.104
In April 2017 a much-heralded North Korean missile test failed. The occasion was the 105th birthday of Kim Il-sung, and the test came at the end of an extravagant display of weaponry and warplane flybys. If there was one test North Korea needed to get right, it would have been this one. An American carrier group was only three hundred miles off the coast, and China warned that conflict could break out at any moment. The missile blew up seconds after leaving the ground amid speculation that the cause was a US cyberattack. Some defense analysts argued that even the threat of cyberattacks crippling North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs would be enough to bring it to the negotiating table.
Two military threats of modern warfare are missile attacks and cyberattacks, which move the Asian waters contest over reefs and islands into unknown territory. Cyberwarfare is a great equalizer and North Korea, together with China, Iran, and Russia, has some of the most skilled military units working on it.
“Cyber is a new domain we have to research and think through that, and we’re trying to posit as broad a number of scenarios on the effect of that, and long-range precision strike missile,” Tom Culora told me. “We’re not sure how to deal with that, although it’s a little easier because there are kinetics and you can tell where a missile had been launched from. It’s harder to tell a cyberattack and where it’s coming from.”