Painting a Nuclear First Strike As Virtue

At the Washington Examiner scholar Kevin R. James argues in favor of a nuclear first strike against North Korea:

North Korea is a very small country on the ocean adjacent to the U.S. Navy and U.S. allies. These brute geographic facts mean that the North Korean officers in the nuclear command chain will need to respond almost instantly to any alarm they receive. The Kim regime perceives its biggest threat to be internal subversion, and so the very last thing that this regime will do is to train military officers to act independently upon their own judgement. In short, North Korea is structurally incapable of evolving a functional alarm vetting process.

North Korea’s inability to reliably vet alarms, and a policy of confrontation that will surely produce false alarms in abundance, implies that a North Korean nuclear first strike on the U.S. is statistically inevitable — no matter how lucky we are.

A war with North Korea is coming either way.

And so the U.S. has two broad policy options to deal with this reality: It can respond after a North Korean nuclear strike triggered by a false alarm, or it can launch a pre-emptive strike that eradicates the Kim regime and degrades North Korea’s ability to inflict harm upon the U.S. and its allies to the greatest extent possible.

Given North Korean defensive measures, this effort will almost certainly require the use of tactical nuclear weapons. As horrible as a war with North Korea will be, the war will undoubtedly be far less horrible if it begins with a U.S. pre-emptive strike rather than with a North Korean first strike. It is as simple as that.

I think that such a course of action would inevitably draw China and, possibly, Russia into the conflict in support of North Korea in a way that a U. S. counter-attack would not and they’d be using nuclear arms as well. If you’re inclined to dismiss Russia’s power, you might want to read this primer.

My only remaining comment is that there are a lot of crazy people out there and not all of them are in North Korea.

5 comments… add one
  • Andy Link

    James’ arguments are a load of tripe. He makes assumptions and presents them facts that steer toward one conclusion.

  • walt moffett Link

    Guess the lives of 50m South Koreans are meaningless when the game is lets see who can whiz closest to the electric fence.

  • The calculus is actually much tougher than that. Are the lives of the 5 million people of the San Francisco metro area worth more than the lives of 50 million South Koreans? I suspect that most Americans and, importantly, most American presidents would say that they are.

  • Guarneri Link

    Holy, um, Toledo.

  • TastyBits Link

    The guidance system must be accurate enough to hit the target. More than likely, the safest place to be will be where the N. Korean ICBM is targeting.

    Depending upon the existing capacity, it would be possible to destroy most of the most militarily significant targets. On the border, the counter battery units would quickly identify most of the remaining artillery and rockets.

    For a ground invasion, it would take months for the troop buildup, and it is highly likely that it would be noticed. Any subsequent invasion would not be easy, and the last 16 years of military would be useless, initially. (It would be useful for a possible insurgency.)

    Unless the subsequent occupation was more successful than the recent ones, N. Korea would be another failed state.

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