Calm, sensible leaders back away from brink

“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, Mr. President, but I do say not more than 10 or 20 million dead, depending on the breaks.” So said Gen. Buck Turgidson, urging the U.S. president to carry out a nuclear first strike, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film Dr Strangelove.

But nobody in Kubrick’s movie talked like Kim Jong-un: “American bastards would be not very happy with this gift sent on the July 4 anniversary,” he crowed, celebrating North Korea’s first successful test of an ICBM.

They didn’t talk like Donald Trump either: “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Kubrick’s film came out the year after the Cuban Missile crisis. It was a terrifying time, but neither U.S. President John F. Kennedy nor the Soviet leaders used violent language. They stayed calm, and carefully backed away from the brink.

So Kubrick’s fictional leaders had to stay sane. Only his generals and civilian strategic “experts” were crazy. Anything else would have been too implausible even for a wild satire like Strangelove. Whereas now we live in different times.

Trump may not understand what his own words mean, but he is threatening to attack North Korea if it makes any more threats to the United States. That’s certainly how it will be translated into Korean. And Pyongyang will assume the U.S. attack will be nuclear, since it would be even crazier to attack a nuclear-armed country like North Korea using only conventional weapons.

And although a nuclear war with North Korea at this point wouldn’t even muss America’s hair — the few North Korean ICBMs would probably go astray or be shot down before they reached the U.S. — it could kill many millions of Koreans.

A million or so Japanese might die as well and tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers in western Pacific bases. Indeed, as the scale of the potential disaster comes home to North Korean strategists, you can see them start to play with the idea of a “limited nuclear war.”

North Korean planners have announced they are examining a plan for a missile attack on the big U.S. base on Guam. In that way they could “signal their resolve” in a crisis by hitting only one isolated U.S. military target. Their hope would be that such a limited attack would not unleash an all-out U.S. nuclear counter-attack that would level North Korea.

“Limited” nuclear war typically becomes a favourite topic whenever strategists realize that using their cherished nuclear weapons any other way means unimaginable levels of death and destruction. It has never been credible, because it assumes that people will remain severely rational and unemotional while under attack by nuclear weapons.

Thinking about limited nuclear war, while unrealistic, is evidence that the planners are starting to get really scared about an all-out nuclear war, which is just what you want them to be. Nevertheless, we are entering a dangerous phase of the process, not least because the other two major nuclear powers in the world, China and Russia, both have land borders with North Korea. And neither of them trusts the United States.

What “process” are we talking about here? The process of coming to an accommodation that lets North Korea keep a nuclear deterrent, while reassuring it that it will never have to use those weapons.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson briefly said that the U.S. was not seeking to change the North Korean regime last week, although he was almost immediately contradicted by Trump. In the long run, however, that is the unpalatable but acceptable way out of this crisis. In fact, there is no other way out. — Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.