Around these parts, North Korea’s ICBM program is the national-security obsession du jour. That’s validating for someone like me, sure. But why? And why now?
As I see it, there are good reasons and bad reasons to be concerned, and focusing on one set or another will lead to very different conclusions.
Let’s start with the good reasons.
The first and most straightforward: there are already a couple of nuclear-armed countries that (I presume) target the United States. Whatever else one might say about that, the fewer, the better. New mutual nuclear deterrence relationships, furthermore, seem to be the least stable. Relations and communications between the two sides are also quite poor in this instance.
Second, North Korea is the only state to develop the means to build nuclear weapons while inside the Non-Proliferation Treaty, exit the treaty, and then build and test bombs. The more successful this endeavor, the worse it is for the nonproliferation regime, other things being equal.
Third, the entire point of ICBMs, for the North Koreans, appears to be driving a wedge between the United States and South Korea. If America has more “skin in the game” during a crisis, the thinking goes, it will be less inclined to use its superior military power to face down the threat to the South.
Fourth, and particularly important to anyone contemplating the merits of negotiating a renewed freeze on North Korea’s missile testing, is that they haven’t flight-tested an ICBM yet. Without flight tests, they can’t identify and resolve the final technical issues that may stand between them and a credible threat to the United States itself. The horse is out of the barn when it comes to the regional threat, but the intercontinental threat still hasn’t fully emerged. That alone makes it something worth talking about.
On to the bad reasons.
First, lately we hear that North Korea is now “racing” or hell-bent on getting an ICBM, which means that the United States, or China, or somebody, must move with alacrity to prevent it, somehow. But that’s not so. History did not start on January 1, 2017, when Kim Jong Un declared that his country had, in the previous year, entered the final phase of preparations for flight-testing ICBMs. You might not recall the controversies around missile threats (and missile defense) in the late 1990s, including NIE 95-19, the Gates Panel, and the Rumsfeld Commission. It suffices to say that after all this back and forth, the intelligence community took the view in 2000 that “during the next 15 years the United States most likely will face ICBM threats from Russia, China, and North Korea, probably from Iran, and possibly from Iraq,” as defined by the first successful flight test in each case.
North Korea refrained from missile tests from 1998 until 2006, which must have slowed progress. But when Pyongyang unveiled its ICBM program in early 2012, it appeared that it might still be on track to meet the window of the old estimate. Indeed, in the fall of 2010, the United States was already so alarmed by indications of progress that—well, over to you, Mark Landler of the NYT:
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s patience with China had been fraying for months, and by November 2010 he was fed up. Meeting with President Hu Jintao in Seoul, South Korea, Mr. Obama warned that if China did not do more to curb North Korea’s bellicose behavior, he would have to take steps to shield the United States from the threat of a nuclear missile attack from the North.
(Psst. Sound familiar?)
Anyway, North Korea could start testing ICBMs at any time. But it’s already 2017, and they’ve defied expectations up to now by not doing so. Probably that’s a matter of restraint rather than incapacity. It also seems to reflect Kim Jong Un’s priorities: if the primary role of nuclear weapons is to prevent an invasion, then the short- and medium-range missiles that can hit U.S. bases in the region are of the essence, while the long-term effort to crack the alliance is secondary.
Whatever the reasons, the fact is that North Korea tests a heck of a lot of theater missiles, especially since Kim Jong Un came to power; on that score, have a good look at this outstanding NTI report by CNS’s Shea Cotton and colleagues. While it does space launches every few years, North Korea has yet to flight-test a mobile, survivable ICBM.
So sure. Maybe they’re finally getting ready for the big show. But they haven’t exactly been rushing to get there, compared to the effort they’ve put into other delivery systems.
Second, and related to the first, is the insinuation that North Korea is so crazy, so dangerous, so unpredictable, that it wouldn’t be like having a mutual deterrence situation with Russia or China. Therefore, we must do something about it.
This must sound awfully familiar to anyone who has studied the history of the Chinese nuclear program. There was a fairly serious debate in Washington about whether to try to bomb it out of existence before China’s first nuclear test. After all, lots of people then thought that Mao was crazy. Before the first nuclear test certainly would have been the relevant time to try such a thing. Needless to say, we didn’t do so, and we have survived.
What’s more, there’s a much better case to be made that Mao was “crazy” than any of the Kims were. The Great Leap Forward. The Cultural Revolution. Now that’s insanity. North Korea’s rhetoric may be colorful, but it’s nothing remotely like Mao’s infamous appeal to Khrushchev to start a nuclear war with the United States—on Chinese soil.
All rhetoric aside, the North Koreans show a pretty good understanding of what nuclear weapons are about. At the time of the first inter-Korean summit in 2000, the late Kim Jong Il told visiting members of the South Korean press that it was ridiculous to think North Korea could beat America by shooting missiles at it. Now that the nukes are out in the open, his son Kim Jong Un talks about brinkmanship. That may be appalling, but it makes him no crazier than John Foster Dulles.
So, once we are done insisting that China will fix this problem for us, and it turns out there’s no Plan B, perhaps we’ll consider what it takes to bargain with the North Koreans, or we’ll learn to live in the same dangerous situation that our allies already do.
And yet. Just last week, we were treated to the unedifying sight of Sen. Lindsey Graham on the Today Show. Prompted by the hosts, he took up the subject of preemption. As transcribed by the South Korean press, he said,
“It would be terrible but the war would be over here (there), wouldn’t be here,” Graham said with a gesture with his fingers. “It would be bad for the Korean Peninsula. It would be bad for China.
It would be bad for Japan, be bad for South Korea. It would be the end of North Korea. But what it would not do is hit America and the only way it could ever come to America is with a missile.”
Asked if he would support a preemptive strike on the North, Graham said, “If that’s what it would take.”
Graham also said the US is “on a collision course” with the North.
The senator said North Korea was a topic when he had lunch with President Donald Trump.
“I said, ‘Do you want on your resume that during your presidency the North Koreans developed a missile that could hit the American homeland with a nuclear weapon on top of it?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely not,'” Graham said.
Granted, this is an interesting backhanded concession that we’ve wasted billions and billions of dollars on a poorly conceived, mismanaged strategic ballistic missile defense system that no one is willing to rely on when it comes down to it. But put that aside for now.
Here’s the thing that Sen. Graham, remarkably, seems not to get: The entire point of the American alliances with South Korea and Japan is mutual defense and security. It would make a mockery of that idea if United States were to do something “bad” or “terrible” to its allies and trade partners, like start a nuclear war in their neighborhood. If North Korea with an ICBM would be so intolerably dangerous for the United States that we would be prepared to discard the most vital interests of our allies in order to save our own skins, then it would be far better for them, and for us, just to leave the region. North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles wouldn’t endanger us then, and no one—friend, foe, or frenemy—would have to suffer from our choice of a preventive war. After all, we don’t go out of our way to deter the North Koreans just for the thrill of it.
If, on the other hand, America is in the business of sharing the burdens of defense with like-minded countries and keeping the world as free, secure, and prosperous as we can manage, then we have some difficult choices to make. Bargaining may not work. Deterrence may fail. But those are risks I’d take long before the meager comfort of getting our shot in first. Anyone who thinks carefully about the reasons that North Korean ICBMs are a problem, I hope, will reach the same conclusion.