Negotiate peace without disarming North Korea

I see that American exceptionalism is alive and well (“Advantage Kim,”June 12): Denuclearization for thee but not for me! Apparently, North Korea must unilaterally disarm and leave itself vulnerable to invasion, just as Libya's Gaddafi fatally weakened himself when he abandoned his nukes. Americans are understandably afraid of Mr. Kim's nukes, but they seem to have trouble imagining why he would be afraid of our nukes, not to mention all our conventional forces, which would continue to threaten his country if he were to comply with all our demands. After all, the U.S. is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons, and it was the U.S. that devastated the North in the Korean War, killing maybe a fifth of their population, not the other way around.

We have managed to negotiate peace with other nuclear powers, like Russia and China, so it is not clear why we cannot manage this with a nuclear North Korea. Our goal should be to extricate ourselves from the Korean Peninsula as soon as possible; we should not make such extrication conditional on the North's unilateral disarmament. We have our own deterrent and have nothing seriously to fear from a nuclear North that we don't already fear from the established nuclear powers. And if we are genuinely afraid for the fate of our allies in South Korea and Japan, maybe we should seriously consider allowing them to develop their own nuclear deterrents. We already ruined one country (Iraq) based on our excessive zeal for denuclearization above peace; let us not make the same mistake with the Koreas.