At RealClearPolitics Charles Lipson, whose blog Zip Dialog is in my select blogroll at right, ably summarizes the “North Korea crisis”:
We have entered the most dangerous moment in world politics since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
The nightmare is only getting worse, thanks to North Korea’s increasingly rapid development of nuclear weapons, the missiles to deliver them, and the regime’s chilling threats to use them against the U.S., Japan, and South Korea.
There’s only one paragraph in his assessment that I found controversial:
Since deterrence is almost certain to work, the real question is “Is ‘near certainty’ good enough?†If there is a 10 percent chance Seattle and Los Angeles could be destroyed in some future conflict with North Korea, should we wage preventive war now? What if the chance is 5 percent? 1 percent? No one has any idea what the odds are. No one. But we do know that preventive war now will kill tens of thousands, possibly many more, and we know the last preventive war ended badly.
I think, quite to the contrary, that deterrence is almost certain not to work in North Korea’s case because of the country’s unique political and cultural circumstances and that, absent a willingness in the United States to impose sanctions on China, North Korea’s primary sponsor and abettor in its nuclear weapons development, our alternatives are limited to preventive war or what President Obama referred to as “strategic patience”.
Preventive war is always immoral for reasons along the lines that Mr. Lipson lists and is certainly illegal. I choose patience.
Sadly, I also think that Mr. Lipson gravely underestimates the likely death toll of war with North Korea. It is far more likely to number in the millions than tens of thousands and our political leaders and media pundits are doing an awful job of preparing us for the likely outcome.
A question, Mr. Schuler.
Why do you think deterrence won’t work? Do you think that NK leadership doesn’t believe that the US nuclear arsenal will destroy them in the event of a NK first strike? Or do you think that the NK leadership maybe doesn’t care?
Because when the Kims and the North Koreans tell us that they believe something, I accept that they believe it. Kim Jong Un thinks he’s a living god with preternatural abilities of leadership and military prowess. So do his people. Uniting the Korean peninsula under the Kim dynasty remains the Kims’ goal.
Under the circumstances how can deterrence possibly work?
Thanks for answering. I think my confusion was about what we think our nuclear arsenal deters. I believe the US nuclear force is a credible deterrent for anyone who wants to drop a nuke on the US and our allies (South Korea, Japan). But I don’t think the US arsenal deters NK from making a conventional attack on the South.
I think NK’s bombs make excellent deterrents for the US making a conventional attack on the North. Is a preemptive US attack on NK worth risking the destruction of Seoul or Tokyo? I doubt it.
I think that our nuclear arsenal is a fine deterrent against actors (like Russia or China) who see things more or less as we do. I don’t think they’re an effective deterrent against anything the Kim regime might want to do, against the Iranian mullahs, or against DAESH. Their calculations are just too different from ours.
Consequently, near peer war is genuinely unlikely. Wars against people with religious beliefs that tell them God will protect them? Not so much.
BTW, I think that China is on the edge of that. I surmise that there are some amongst the Chinese military leadership who think that China could be victorious in a nuclear war against the U. S.
I can’t imagine a war against North Korea going “well” unless we really struck a pre-emptive blow, splattering virtually every inch of the country to be sure we killed Kim and all the military leaders before they could react. No country in history ever had that kind of military success.
More usefully, we’ve got nuclear weapons in the background for policy — we won’t use them unless the North Koreans go first, but By God if we do use them, it’s going to spell death for everyone in that country. We can make that a creditable threat, I believe. (It’d probably be even more believable, the more conventional weaponry we wave around.)