North Korea and its weapons programs are now a fact of life
North Korea’s once un think able nuclear and missile capabilities are, as long as the country wants, here to stay.
With each North Korean nuclear or missile test, U.S. officials go through a ritual that appears increasingly at odds with reality.
They declare they will not tolerate the rogue programs they have demonstrated little ability to slow, much less remove. They organize more of the talks or sanctions that have failed to alter North Korea’s strategic calculus. And they issue threats that, if carried out, would either change little or risk an allout war.
But the best Washington can hope for, analysts and former officials increasingly say, may be to freeze the program in place. Even this would most likely come at a steep cost, a grim recognition both the threat is severe and that U.S. leverage is limited.
“The window for denuclearization closed a long time ago,” Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, wrote in a column this week.
The threat can be managed, he continued, only by “accepting the unacceptable” as a hard fact of life.
North Korea has achieved this through more than just missiles and bombs. By exploiting the dynamics of nuclear warfare and diplomacy, this otherwise weak country, whose economy is estimated to be smaller than that of Birmingham, Ala., can dictate terms to the world’s most powerful country.
The United States now faces the hostile end of a nuclear deterrence model it was the first to develop.
In the early years of the Cold War, with American allied West Germany facing down an overwhelming Soviet threat, the United States promised any attack would prompt nuclear retaliation.
It worked, deterring the Soviets even from an invasion of West Berlin that it could have completed in a matter of hours.
North Korea may have achieved a similarly effective deterrent. Though it would quickly lose any war, it could impose unacceptable costs on South Korea,
Japan and potentially the United States.
North Korea has developed certain technologies that, taken together, demonstrate something analysts call “asymmetric retaliation,” with which it can guarantee a nuclear response to any attack.
Its medium-range missiles can hold South Korea and Japan, where tens of thousands of U.S. troops are based, at risk. Special canisters allow the missiles to remain pre-fueled, shortening launch time. Track-driven mobile launchers can hide in remote locations, forcing U.S. war planners to doubt that strikes could eliminate all such missiles before they are launched.
A missile submarine, while believed to be the only such vehicle in North Korea’s modest navy, increases the country’s odds of landing at least one retaliatory strike.
As a result, any conflict, even limited, would require the United States to be willing to sacrifice thousands of American lives and far more South Korean lives. Both countries are prosperous democracies — normally strengths that, up against the more risk willing North Korea, become weaknesses.
There is another force working in North Korea’s favor, known as “first-strike instability,” in which both sides must fear that any exchange, however small, will escalate to nuclear launches.
In the Cold War, this kept the United States and the Soviet Union locked in a comparable balance of power. On the Korean Peninsula, it does something
otherwise impossible: It puts North Korea on equal footing with the United States.
North Korea’s strategy makes clear that even a limited strike, either to eliminate its weapons or its leadership, would prompt a full retaliation.
Because North Korea sees the weapons as its only hope for survival, losing them risks provoking the country’s fears of a full invasion or an effort to topple the government. And because Pyongyang believes it can survive such a threat only by retaliating, its incentive is to do so before it is too late.
The United States’ overwhelming strength is, paradoxically, also a weakness. North Korean leaders must consider even a limited strike or accidental escalation as the start of a war they could lose within hours, virtually forcing them to immediately execute their full war plan.
This constrains U.S. options. Even a single strike — for example, to destroy a missile or merely to punish the government — risks provoking a full war.
William J. Perry, a former secretary of defense, said in January, “It is my strongly held view that we don’t have it in our power today to negotiate an end to the nuclear weapons program in North Korea.”
Rather, he said, the United States should aim to “lessen the danger” by seeking an end to missile tests.
Mark Fitzpatrick, a scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, this week advocated something known as “double suspension.” The United States would suspend its military exercises with the South while the North would suspend its nuclear and perhaps missile tests.
There has been a broader shift toward such thinking. The ambition is no longer to roll back North Korea’s programs, but to mitigate the risk they pose day to day.
This is a tacit acknowledgment that North Korea’s preferred negotiations model — in which the United States takes steps away from the Korean Peninsula in exchange for peace — is increasingly accepted.
Even if North Korea never achieves its vision of full victory, it has shifted the conversation to its terms.
Fitzpatrick and others say the United States should pursue such steps only if they point toward North Korean disarmament, but some consider this optimistic.
Ankit Panda, a senior editor at The Diplomat, and Vipin Narang, a professor at MIT, wrote this week that there were “no good options” for the United States, “only bad ones and catastrophic ones.”
Any viable deal with the North Koreans, they suggested, “would require explicit acceptance of their nuclear state status and significant rollbacks to the U.S. conventional military presence in the Northeast Asian theater, both of which are nonstarters for the United States.”
The likeliest outcome, they concluded, is that the world’s nations “learn to live with an ICBM-armed North Korea.”