North Korea ‘begging for war,’ U.S. says
MISSILE DEFENCE THE ONLY CREDIBLE OPTION TO DEFEND AGAINST A NUCLEAR MADMAN
It has been four weeks since Donald Trump vowed to rain down upon North Korea “fire and fury, like the world has never seen” if it continued to behave so belligerently. Since that time the regime has threatened to annihilate Guam, sent a missile over Japan, and exploded what it claimed was a hydrogen bomb.
If the aim was to cow Kim Jong Un into setting aside his nuclear ambitions, it has clearly failed. To deter an adversary, it is not sufficient to string together a lot of blustery B-movie rhetoric, no matter how heavily you scowl. There must be some serious likelihood — or at least, your adversary must believe there is — of the threat actually being carried out.
Whether or not an adversary is likely to believe that will in part depend on the perceived character and reputation of the person issuing the threat; in part on whether he is perceived to have the backing of those around him; in part on similar perceptions of solidarity with allied countries. On none of these fronts are Trump’s threats remotely credible.
Not only is he a habitual liar, but he is a notorious coward, who regularly issues threats he has no intention of delivering on. In the current crisis, his more inflammatory statements (“talking is not the answer!” is another example) have been repeatedly contradicted by subordinates. And at the very moment when solidarity with allies would seem to be most critical, he publicly insults South Korea as appeasers and threatens to tear up a trade agreement with it.
It’s conceivable, as some have theorized, that Trump is trying some version of the “madman” strategy, hoping to convince the world he’s just crazy enough to attack out of pique. But even that is not credible. He’s not insane; he’s just a fool.
The larger problem, however, is strategic, and goes well beyond Trump. No president, no matter how impressive his reputation or how solid his support, could credibly threaten to use nuclear weapons, even against so odious a regime as Kim’s, unless himself facing an actual or imminent nuclear attack: the loss of life would be simply too great.
Indeed, even in the event of a North Korean attack it’s not self-evident how the United States would respond.
This has always been the flaw at the heart of Mutual Assured Destruction: if it was unlikely the West would launch a nuclear attack in advance of a similarly cataclysmic attack by the Soviets, it was scarcely more likely it would do afterwards.
The notion that the president of the United States, having watched one or more of its cities destroyed with hundreds of thousands of its citizens killed, would coolly order the incineration of hundreds of thousands of the enemy’s citizens in response, has always seemed a fantasy.
It was only even halfway plausible if the two, attack and counter-attack, occurred almost precisely simultaneously, indeed more or less automatically — the “doomsday device” of early strategic doctrine. Yet the implications were so horrifying that Western defence planners soon developed more credible deterrence scenarios, involving the use of tactical (i.e. battlefield) nukes to counter, say, a Soviet invasion of West Germany, with well-marked escalation points from there. And against a rational enemy, with experienced military commanders and comprehensible strategic goals, that proved a stable, if at times terrifying, equilibrium.
Whether ordinary deterrence theory has any relevance to the present situation, however, is very much in doubt. North Korea may not be an expansionist power like the Soviet Union, but it is not a particularly stable or predictable one, either. Add in the Trump factor, and the chance of a catastrophic error by one side or the other, while still unlikely, is still too high for comfort.
What is to be done? A preventive strike, aimed not at obliterating the country but disarming its missiles and decapitating its leadership, sounds attractive — but is considered infeasible. Short of absolute success, moreover, the North Koreans would respond by attacking South Korea, with catastrophic loss of life.
Sanctions are worth trying, or rather trying again — perhaps they will yet succeed where they have failed before. Diplomacy, likewise, is all very well — perhaps the Chinese may yet be prevailed upon to lean on their client state — though Trump’s tweeted threat to “stop all trade” with any country that trades with North Korea (that would be China) is no more credible than the rest of his bombast.
The ideal solution, of course, would have been to have prevented North Korea from ever getting nukes in the first place. But as we have seen elsewhere, once a regime has really set its mind on acquiring nuclear weapons, it’s very hard to stop it; and once it has them, impossible to get it to give them up.
So, if it can’t be forced to disarm, can’t be bribed or persuaded to, and can’t even reliably be deterred, what can be done? There is one alternative: if the threat cannot be removed, it can at least be neutralized, through the system of anti-missile missiles known as ballistic missile defence.
This was controversial back in the day, when the issue was whether this would destabilize the balance of terror on which deterrence relied — or, somewhat contradictorily, whether it was possible to defend against an all-out nuclear attack involving hundreds of missiles. But there is no stable equilibrium to be maintained here; neither does North Korea have anything like the number of missiles the Soviets did.
At any rate, knocking Kim’s missiles out of the sky seems the least bad alternative available, and about the only thing that can be credibly threatened.