North Korea and Nuclear Weapons

Entering the New Era of Deterrence

Sung Chull Kim, Michael D. Cohen, Sung Chull Kim, Michael D. Cohen

• Verlag: Georgetown University Press
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781626164543
• Thema: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Thema: Seguridad nacional

North Korea is perilously close to developing strategic nuclear weapons capable of hitting the United States and its East Asian allies. Since their first nuclear test in 2006, North Korea has struggled to perfect the required delivery systems. Kim Jong-un's regime now appears to be close, however. Sung Chull Kim, Michael D. Cohen, and the volume contributors contend that the time to prevent North Korea from achieving this capability is virtually over; scholars and policymakers must turn their attention to how to deter a nuclear North Korea. The United States, South Korea, and Japan must also come to terms with the fact that North Korea will be able to deter them with its nuclear arsenal. How will the erratic Kim Jong-un behave when North Korea develops the capability to hit medium- and long-range targets with nuclear weapons? How will and should the United States, South Korea, Japan, and China respond, and what will this mean for regional stability in the short term and long term? The international group of authors in this volume address these questions and offer a timely analysis of the consequences of an operational North Korean nuclear capability for international security.

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

1. provoking standing military forces into more reciprocal alerts and military improvements, and reciprocal responses to those improvements;
2. promoting preemptive strike plans and deployments, increasing the potential instability within long-standing reciprocal deterrence postures in and around the peninsula;
3. heightening existing political conflicts—one way that deterrence employed to dampen conflicts can actually further provoke them;
4. 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
5. 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

1. competitive management (e.g., balance-of-power arrangements);
2. unipolar management;
3. 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
4. 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:

1. further nuclear proliferation efforts within the region;
2. reductions in the effectiveness or credibility of US extended deterrence;
3. military action to repress North Korea’s nuclear weapon program; and
4. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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
3. 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.
4. 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 ...