America must choose: Cut rhetoric or wage war

The last time when North Korean nuclear weapons might have been headed off by diplomacy was 15 to 20 years ago, when there was a deal freezing North Korean work on nuclear weapons, and then one stopping the country’s work on long-range ballistic missiles.

If they had been negotiated with the same attention to detail as the recent deal that has frozen Iran’s nuclear program for 10 years, maybe North Korea’s quest for nuclear-tipped ICBMs could have been stopped for good — or maybe not, because North Korea has always wanted an effective deterrent to the U.S. nuclear threat.

At any rate, both the nuclear and the missile deals with North Korea failed after a couple of years. Pyongyang and Washington were equally to blame, resorting to tit-for-tat retaliation for perceived breaches.

But it was the U.S. that had more to lose, since it faced no nuclear threat from North Korea unless the deals were abandoned and North Korea’s weapons research went ahead. What we have seen recently — two ICBM tests in July, another one last month, and now what was almost certainly North Korea’s first test of a thermonuclear weapon is the inevitable result of the failure then.

It took a lot of time and effort to get Pyongyang’s bomb and missile programs to this point, and Kim Jong-un’s regime decided the safest way to test the new weapons and vehicles was all at once. He’s right.

Stringing the tests out over a couple years might have given their enemies time to organize a complete trade embargo against North Korea, or maybe some form of attack. The safer course was to bunch the tests up, get the outrage over fast, then hope the issue fades into the background.

That’s what both India and Pakistan did in 1998, and it worked for them. Everybody eventually got used to the idea that they were more or less legitimate nuclear weapons powers.

There is no good military option available to the United States and its allies in the current crisis, even though U.S. President Donald Trump says “We’ll see.” A direct U.S. attack on North Korea using only conventional weapons would not get all of North Korea’s nukes, which are hidden in hardened underground sites or moved around by night on mobile launchers. It would also call down “fire and fury” on Seoul from 10,000 North Korean artillery pieces and short-range rockets.

A U.S. nuclear attack would probably still not get all of Kim’s nukes: North Korea is the hardest intelligence target in the world. Pyongyang may already be able to reach the United States with one or two ICBMs carrying thermonuclear warheads, and it can certainly reach all of South Korea and Japan.

Trump’s talk of stopping U.S. trade with any country that trades with North Korea is really aimed at China. But cutting U.S. trade with China would cause immense disruption to the American economy, and it’s unlikely Trump would do it.

Normally, when human beings encounter a problem that they cannot eliminate, they find ways of living with it. It often takes a while for them to get there, however, and we are currently in the dangerous phase where some people are convinced they can make the problem go away.

The only excuse for radical action now would be a conviction that Kim is a crazy man who will use his nuclear weapons to launch an unprovoked attack on the U.S., even though it would certainly lead to his own death and that of his regime. If you truly believe that, then the right course of action is an all-out nuclear attack on North Korea right now.

Otherwise, start dialing back your rhetoric, because you are going to have to accept that North Korea now has a usable nuclear deterrent. You can live with that, because it’s better than fighting a nuclear war.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.