The very first atomic explosion, 1945. The US device at this time was an exception to what would become the rule. . . it was an offensive weapon. North Korea's nuclear missiles stand a frightening chance of becoming yet another type of exception, and also an offensive one.
If a person is going to urge action, like I did recently on the menace of North Korea, maybe they ought to stay what sort of actions can be taken.
So we look at that in regards to North Korea.
Frankly, none of the options are great.
We'll get to that in a moment. But if we're going to look at options, particularly options that might involve war, perhaps we better ask a question first, that being; why does North Korea even want nuclear armed missiles?
Oh surely you jest. . . you may be thinking.
No, I'm not.
It's a question that needs to be answered.
Nuclear Weapons. Why?
U.S. Atlas ICMB, our first, which came on line in 1957. The Soviet R& was introduced, first, that same year.
Consider this. Contrary to what people like to commonly assert, nations generally do not arm themselves with weapon simply because they can. They arm themselves with weapons that are useful and which suit their strategic purposes.
For this reason there are plenty of weapons that nations actually forgo atomic weaponry. Indeed, compared to the nations that could equip themselves with atomic weapons relatively easily but do not, the number that do is actually fairly small. They are: the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and now North Korea. South Africa is believed to have developed a bomb, for some odd reason but gave it up, illustrating what I've noted above. Lots of other nations could have atomic weaponry if they chose to, including, for instance, all of the European powers, Canada and Brazil. But they don't. Quite frankly that's because they're of very limited utility, but also because most nations that don't have a bomb would be hurt by having one, or they're close allies of some nation that has a bomb and therefore any purpose they'd achieve in acquiring one would be pointless.
North Korea, however, is an exception.
And that's what should scare us.
So what are the purposes in having a nuclear device? Well, there are three. In order of importance, they are: 1) a defensive purpose, 2) prestige, 3), an offensive purpose.
That's right, prestige is a purpose in acquiring an atomic weapon, or it once was. That's why at least to of the countries in the list, the UK and France, developed atomic weaponry, or at least its part of the reason.
Let's take a look at each of these reasons.
Long serving Tu-95, the Soviet Bear bomber best known for its extended maritime patrols.
USAF B-52. The B-52 entered service the same year that the Tu-95 did. It was a much more advanced aircraft and it also remains in service to this day.
1. Defensive.
August 29, 1949 ushered in the age of defensive nuclear armaments.
That was the date that the Soviet Union detonated RDS-1, their first atomic bomb, which was very similar to the "Fat Man" bomb the U.S. used on Japan during World War Two. That similarity was not accidental, the American government was heavily penetrated by Soviet spies at the time and had been dating back into the 1930s. And this penetration included the US's wartime nuclear program. The US was dense to this reality, to their discredit, but it was the case.
This isn't, of course, as history of Soviet spying in the United States. This is a discussion of nuclear arms and up until that 1949 date the US was the only nation that had nuclear weapons. After that date, that was no longer true. The Soviets couldn't instantly deploy a significant nuclear stockpile, of course, but they would soon enough. The long nuclear nightmare had begun.
A B-58 in flight in 1967. The B-58 was the first US supersonic strategic bomber and it was designed to drop nuclear weapons exclusively. Seeing one in flight a couple of years after this is one of the enduring memories of my childhood.
But, in spite of the way the public commonly imagined it, that was a defensive nuclear nightmare.
Nations that hold nuclear weapons for defensive purposes use them to deter other nations from doing something else. For the most part, they use them to deter other nations from using nuclear weapons on them, although sometimes that deterrence has been expanded out to deter, in one fashion or another, the use of conventional force as well. The theory, and one that has proven fairly correct in its application, is that no nation will attempt to use nuclear weapons on a nuclear armed state. Or, if expanded out, no nation will invade a nation or region if there's a realistic threat that this will bring a nuclear response (a much less credible threat, by the way).
This is the situation that developed fairly rapidly in the Cold War. Up until RDS-1 the US was the only nuclear armed state and while the US expected other nations to acquire the bomb, sooner or later, it also expected the use of it to be routine and the US itself was fairly indistinct on when it felt use of the bomb was strategically sound. After August 1949, while it would not really sink in fully for years, it became apparent that it was never strategically sound to deploy nuclear weapons as it would nearly always bring a nuclear response.
Indeed, while Americans tend not to really appreciate it, the Soviet bomb was defensive bomb from the outset. With an enormous conventional army that dwarfed those to the west, and with an impressive record of being willing to sustain mass causalities to defeat an enemy on the ground, the thought in the West did lean towards simply deploying nuclear weapons if necessary, and the Soviet thought ran towards preventing that from occurring. After the early 1950s, when the Soviets had an appreciable nuclear arsenal, that worry was effectively mitigated. While the United States never declared during the Cold War (contrary to common belief) that the US wouldn't use nuclear weapons first, or that it wouldn't use low yield (comparatively) nuclear weapons on the battlefield (and in fact it threatened to deploy them openly to Europe in the 1980s), and while the Soviets actually did declare that they would never use them first (and that they regarded any use of a nuclear weapon to be a "first use"), it was commonly understood that the US would never use them first. It was feared that the Soviets would, but with the benefit of hindsight it seems pretty clear that they wouldn't have either. That left the Soviet ground forces, in the event of war, safe (if nervous) under a nuclear umbrella and it likewise did the same for the US and its NATO allies. In the end, that's why the Soviets continued to develop their World War Two style massive armored army, and why the US and other NATO allies countered by developing high technology conventional armies. They planned to fight, if they had to, conventionally. Each side's nuclear weaponry deterred the use of the same by the opponent.
It was all defensive.
The USAF B-1,t he strategic bomber that was to replace the B-52 but which never did. It also remains in service.
Other nations have acquired nuclear arms for similar purposes, although often mixed with the motive that will be mentioned immediately below. Probably Israel's unacknowledged nuclear arsenal is the most notable example. Known to exist but never admitted, it's held to counter the use of nuclear weapons by any of its enemies and. . . maybe, to keep the country from being overrun at the end of the day. China's weapons, the UK's and France's all likewise fit into the defensive category. But at least with the UK and France, the next item is also of some consideration. . .
2. Prestige.
Imperial German High Seas Fleet. Yes, battleships were useful, but the super expensive weapon was also a matter of prestige. In some instances, the prestige of having battleships rivaled their utility, and their great expense made nations that had them very reluctant to risk them. The Germans and the British, during their battleship era, risked them against each other a single time.
It's odd to think of now, but there was an era in which having a nuclear arsenal was proof that you were a first world country of real weight.
Now, having a major tech industry fits that bill. Or maybe a really advanced economy. Or maybe a functioning health care system. But having nukes isn't. Not anymore.
It was once.
Coming out of World War Two much of the glory of the Western world lay in ruins. The United Kingdom was badly battered and kept rationing in place until the 1950s. France suffered major devastation and teetered on the brink of a communist revolution. Italy was prostrate, wrecked and given to crime of all types. Germany, formerly the major economic powerhouse of central Europe was reduced to rubble due to the final two years of round the clocking bombing that took place during World War Two, followed by intense fighting on its own soil. Things were pretty bad for Europe and European culture.
B-24 over Polesti during World War Two.
And Europe and European culture was the global standard. All the world powers had been European. The one nation that tried to contest that and join the club, Japan, was wrecked, including the devastation that was brought by the use of two atomic bombs by t he United States, although in fairness that paled in comparison to the devastation brought by conventional bombing and firing bombing, let alone over a decade, in Japan's case, of war.
Frankfurt, May 1945.
The United States, on the other hand, was looking pretty good. The country had suffered the loss of life, mostly of fighting men, during the war, but not as many. 407,316 fighting men, a shocking number by any standard, died or disappeared during the war while serving in the American armed forces. The British Commonwealth's loss was about the same, it should be noted, being 580,497 men from all branches of all of the various services that held a connection to Britain. 5,318,000 German fighting men died during the war by comparison. It's often noted that the majority of German combat losses were on the Eastern Front (a somewhat involved analysis, however, that's rarely done) and it should therefore be noted that the Soviets loss approximately twice that number themselves on the battlefield (Japan, Germany's ally, loss a little over 2,100,000 men out of a population that was actually larger than Germany's, Italy loss a little over 300,000 men on all of the European and North African fronts). None of this deals, of course, with civilian losses, which were substantial.
For democratic countries, and that matters a great deal, the impact of the loss of life is more intensely felt than in dictatorial ones. None of the Western democracies could have sustained the loss of life that the Germans, Soviets and the Japanese did (and one non democratic Axis power, having a population that leaned towards primitive democracy in any event, refused to do so, that being Italy). So the Western allies fought in a different style, emphasizing, as they would later in the Cold War, technology and firepower over human loss.
Be that as it may, the course of the war saw the technological advantage and industrial advantage significantly shift during the war. Armies may be the glory of dictatorships and wartime nations, but industry and a solid economy is the glory of a peacetime nation. For nations is some sort of cold war, and the Cold War isn't the only example of such, expensive weapons may give evidence of that. During World War Two it was actually the United Kingdom, not Germany, that was the economic and industrial powerhouse early in the war, although Germany was contenting for that title. By mid war the UK was sharing this position with the US. By the war's end, the US was the undisputed industrial and economic champion, providing weapons to every single allied nation and as well as cash. No other nation came close to comparing to the United States in these regards. When the war was over the United States was the only world power left standing, although the USSR was clearly contending for that position. The atomic bomb, which of course had been constructed with significant British assistance, symbolized that position.
Which is why the United Kingdom and France soon had their own. The UK, with US assistance at first, and then without it, and then with it again, developed their atomic weapon by 1952. France touched off its first experimental nuclear device in 1960, in the Algerian Saharan desert, while it was fighting with the FLN and others for control of that colony.* France was struggling to regain respect in the international community at the time having lost to Germany in 1940, having suffered severe internal conflict thereafter, having lost Indochina to the Indochinese and then being on the verge of losing Algeria, which had been one of its very first overseas colonies and which was regarded as an overseas department of France.** Having a bomb showed that these nations were still first rate, industrial, major powers.
And then something began to happen.
After the major World War Two players obtained the bomb it became fairly obvious that any major first world nation could have one, if it wanted to. But most opted not to, and the views about holding the bomb began to really change. The perpetual underlying terror that people endured during the 1950s and 1960s started to give way to an anti bomb sort of feeling perhaps best symbolized by literature and film of the period. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, probably best symbolizes that. Quite a bit different, as was Fail Safe upon which it was based (the book, that is, but there was a contemporary movie as well) from Strategic Air Command of a decade prior. By the time the bomb spread from first world nations to India having one became a matter of condemnation, which was the case for Indian when it acquired one. Ever since acquiring a nuclear device has been cause for contempt and those nations that have them have worked towards trying to reduce them. Joining the nuclear club, now, is somewhat like joining a leper colony. Nobody wants to be a leper and once you are one its really hard not to be one.
So much for prestige, which doesn't mean an isolated country like North Korea is aware of that.
3. Offense
Atomic mushroom cloud over Nagasaki.
The final reason, and by far the most frightening reason, for a nation to have a nuclear weapons is for offensive purposes.
Scary indeed.
This one, perhaps, doesn't require much explanation, but we'll give a little anyway. The concept here is that if war is diplomacy by other means, than any weapon is legitimate if you engage in it. This was basically the view that the United States had in 1945 when we used two atomic bombs on Japan. Whatever you think of the use, one way or another, the decision was made to drop atomic weapons on cities, as targets. Those cities had a military value, which is often forgotten, but that there would be massive and overarching loss of civilian life was known and at least a collateral aspect of their use. Again, while its not popular in most U.S. circles to think of them this way, they weapons were weapons of massive reprisal or, as some have claimed, terror.
Photograph taken from Honkawa Elementary School, photographer unknown, and not discovered until 2013. This photograph was probably taken about three minutes after the blast, although the common story credits it with being taken thirty minutes after the blast.
Irrespective of a person's view of the two atomic strikes by the US, which of course are the only wartime use of nuclear weapons ever, it is important to keep in mind that they came at a point at which the United States was the only nation in the world that had them. Additionally, when those strikes came, the entire world had become acclimated to massive airborne devastation. That doesn't answer any moral questions of any kind, really, but it puts their use in context as by that time quite a few people, including it would seem Harry Truman, had become numbed to massive devastation in wartime and the difference between the use of an atomic weapon and a mass fire bombing was one of degree to an extent An acknowledged difference in kind also existed but it was dimly perceived by some, but not by all.*** There was, moreover, no chance of reprisal strikes of any kind.
High altitude United States Army Air Force photograph following the atomic bomb strike on Hiroshima. Study of the photo in later years has revealed that the enormous cloud is actually the cloud from the firestorm, not the atomic strike. By this point in World War Two fire bombing by the USAAF of Japanese cities had become fairly common and accepted and almost as devastating as the nuclear strikes.
All that fairly rapidly changed after World War Two but it took a while to grasp the change. The USSR's acquisition of atomic weaponry in 1949 meant that, at least as to the Soviet Union, the use of atomic weapons was sure to bring an atomic reprisal, making use against the USSR problematic at best and effectively setting any rational conflict (key word being rational) back to the pre August 1945 status quo ante, maybe, albeit not in an acknowledged form. That this would spread to any potential uses as well was not immediately grasped but it soon came to be the case, and ironically perhaps it came to be grasped quickly by Truman.
For a period of time after World War Two the US defense establishment actually assumed that any future war would be a nuclear one and ground troops merely a trigger to that, and training in the Army (but not the Marine Corps) accordingly suffered. That this was not to be the case first became evident, to a degree, with the Korean War, to which the US committed heavily in a conventional form. During the war Douglas MacArthur, frustrated with Chinese entry into the war, asked for nuclear strikes against the Chinese who were vulnerable to it, relying as they did on mass staging areas in Manchuria, and Truman flatly refused. The first request to use nuclear weapons offensively, in the post World War Two era, was refused.
Not that the concept entirely went away right away. The French, who had not yet developed their own bomb, requested that the US deploy nuclear weapons on their behalf in the jungles around Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The request was seriously considered and the decision was basically made to agree to the desperate French request even though the US did not regard the French struggle in Indochina as a pure struggle against Communism. At that point Eisenhower brought in the Senate leadership and Lyndon Johnson, who was opposed to the idea, asked what the British thought of it. Nobody had thought of asking them up until that point, but it was agreed that this was the proper thing to do. Winston Churchill, who was back in office as of 1951, was flatly opposed to the idea in part as he regarded the French effort in Indochina as completely doomed. But for Churchill and Johnson, it's likely the United States would have deployed nuclear weapons to battlefield use in Indochina in 1954, a move that would have completely legitimized them in that deployment and which would have likely seen their use in similar form in later wars.
French troops (perhaps legionnaires) at Dien Bien Phu. The fate of the men depicted here was a bad one as the French were not able to retain the embattled post and it was eventually overrun, with survivors going into Viet Minh captivity in bad circumstances. The battle would haunt the 1950s and 1960s and formed much of the American thought surrounding the later battle at Khe Sanh during the Vietnam War, to which it bore eerie similarities.
They weren't used, however, and some suggestions that they be used in that fashion during the Vietnam War were flatly rejected as nuts. As time passed, the concept of battlefield use of nuclear weapons nearly died although it was briefly revived during the Carter and Reagan administrations in regards to "Neutron Bombs", a type of small nuclear weapon that generates a high lethal dose of radiation but which doesn't destroy anything.**** The concept died when the Soviet Union indicated that any such use would be regarded by it as lacking any distinction with any other nuclear weapon resulting in a full scale nuclear war.
That later experience came after Mutual Assured Destruction was a fully developed relationship between the US and the USSR, and that effectively converted everyone's nuclear arsenal to a defensive one, only to be used if the other guy used his first, and then to everyone's demise.
So, what's going on with North Korea? Defensive? Prestige?
Maybe.
But maybe their intent is offensive.
Surely, you jest.
Nope, surely I do not.
What's up in the Communist Hermit Kingdom?
Am I suggesting that North Korea intends to launch a nuclear first strike?
No, I'm not suggesting that either.
But I am suggesting it may be planning a conventional invasion of South Korea, protected, in its mind, by a nuclear umbrella. Indeed, the odd that they're planning such an event seriously are at least even.
And here's why.
Every country is a product of its own history and judges the world according to its experiences. This is both a plus and a minus, but more than anything, it's human nature.And in North Korea's history, and given its isolation, it's likely drawing a different lesson about launching a ground invasion of the South, for the second time, than we do. Let's consider that history and what it's likely teaching a person of extraordinarily narrow world view like 33 year old Kim Jong-un.
North Korea's history would teach a leader of that nation, assuming the leader didn't look too broadly, that armed invasions work, and are safe to conduct as long as some powerful force has your back. Moreover, current history would teach it that Korean reunification is growing further apart, rather than closer. Simple observation would teach it that the North increasingly offers very little that entices the South. National mission, or at least he expressed national mission of the leaders of that nation, require it to seek reunification. Economic necessity might as well.
So, if its to fulfill its self expressed national mission, it likely need to do it by armed force. Its not going to happen any other way, absent a collapse of the North Korean regime and the rescue of the North Korean people by the South, which is a very real possibility.
But armed force only make sense if it can succeed. And that's what history likely teaches to Kim Jong-un.
Consider the following.
The North Korean invasion of South Korean in 1950 almost worked. It only failed to reunify the country (which had been only apparent, after having a been a Japanese colony, very briefly) because the United States intervened to prevent that from occurring. Even at that, however, the US rescue barely worked at first. Following that, however, it nearly succeeded in doing in the North Korean regime and reuniting the country under the Southern government. That only failed to occur as the Red Chinese would not stand by to let North Korean fall and itself intervened in force, pushing the Western powers and the ROK army back to the 38th Parallel.
Late model T-34/85 tank knocked out by US, as the turret interestingly indicates, during the Korean war, on July 20, 1950. This tank was arguably the best battle tank in the world at this point in time and American tanks that would ultimately do well against it were of the very late war US heavy class which was soon to be our new main battle tank class. This tank epitomizes the North Korean experience in offensive warfare in every respect.
So what, you may ask, would North Korea have learned from that? Invasions fail?
Not hardly.
Indeed, large-scale offensive operations worked nearly twice during the Korean War, once when North Korea invaded the South and once when the United Nations crossed the 38th Parallel and nearly drove the North Korean army across the Yalu. In both instances the total defeat of the side on the defensive was prevented only by the massive intervention of an outside force. . the United States and associated powers in the case of the 1950 North Korean invasion and Red China in the case of the United Nations counteroffensive of the winter of 1950-51. Put another way, North Korea was prevented from obtaining victory by an American military "umbrella" and North Korea was saved from defeat by a Chinese military "umbrella". And following that, those umbrellas, ultimately ones held by two nuclear armed powers, have kept each side from launching a resumption of aggression since, although South Korea lost the desire to do so after the death of Syngman Rhee, its' first "president". There's no good evidence that North Korea has lost that desire itself. Indeed, massive tunneling and the like would suggest quite the opposite.
North Korean T-34/85 knocked out near the 38th Parallel after the brilliant Marine Corps amphibious landing at Inchon. If the proposed use of atomic bombs was the low part of MacArthur's tenure as supreme commander of the United Nations effort, the landing at Inchon was the high point.
So how would nuclear arms play into this?
In order to do that we need to look just a bit more carefully at the Korean War itself, if we are assuming that Kim Jong-un is deriving his views of the present by the lessons of the fairly short North Korean past.
The 1950 North Korean invasion of the South was a massive conventional military offensive. The North Korean Army was constructed in the model of the Soviet (not the Chinese) Red Army and was very well equipped with World War Two vintage Soviet weapons. It fought in the Soviet style. It was well trained in the Soviet context, which would compare poorly with the World War Two American model but which was still much better than the South Korean army of the day which was very poorly trained. Kim Il-Jung, for his part, was a veteran of the Red Army himself and would develop a personality cult around himself that frankly exceeded that of Mao or Stalin.*****
The only thing that stopped this armored juggernaut was the intervention of a much superior armed force, well equipped with modern weapons and used to fithign a modern war, the U.S. military.
North Korea was saved by an entity that was willing to endure mass casualties, the Red Chinese, but had the mass of men to lose.^
U.S. Marines fighting against the Chinese near the North Korean border with China at the Chosin Reservoir. The tank is a M26 Pershing which had been a heavy tank designed to take on late war German tanks of the Second World War, but which was sent to Korea essentially in the role of a main battle tank in order to take on the T-34. The M26 was the father of every American tank thereafter until the M1 Abrams.
The lesson to draw from that is that, or that might be drawn from that, is that a dedicated North Korean offensive might work under the proper conditions, although the United States stands in the way. The other lesson to be learned is that North Korean can never lose, that is actually be totally defeated, as long as it stands under somebody's "umbrella", that being a Chinese umbrella since 1950.
Now, before we go on to hear "but that's not the correct lesson", let's go one step further. Since 1954, when the armistice was signed halting the fighting, both nations have had an official policy of reunification. The United States effectively halted South Korea from resuming the war, which it was in fact tempted to do, early on. Had the US allowed it, the Korean War would have started back up in the late 1950s or the 1960s. We don't know what goes on north of the 38th Parallel, but chances are good that something similar has occurred there. We do know that North Korea has consistently prepared for n invasion, and even tunneled under the DMZ with tunnels large enough to contain entire divisions.
Perhaps the rational calculation that the United States and ROK military, which is now very good, would stop a North Korean offensive has kept North Korea from invading. Or perhaps the Red Chinese have threatened North Korea with dire implications if they tried it. We don't know.
We shouldn't assume that the calculation that they'd face well trained (and mostly South Korean) forces in an invasion, or that the United States would be involved, is sufficient in and of itself to prevent them from striking South. It might be, but we don't know that. We do know that their experience with surprise conventional attacks nearly worked, although in 1950 they were facing a largely untrained South Korean army rather than the highly trained one that they face now. Still, an Army modeled on the Soviet Red Army and drawing from its experience would know that surprise conventional attacks can work. World War Two, which dimly informs the North Korean Army, provides plenty of examples of that. That they themselves are willing to endure the casualties is apparent. If calculation of their chances has prevented them from launching south so far, it may be largely because they cannot possibly counter the USAF and they should know that.
But what also may weigh into it is that their guaranty from the Chinese may contain restraints. The Chinese entered the war last time as Red China could not bear the thought of an American ally on its borders. It was still truly at war with Nationalist China at the time and the strategic implications of that were too vast. Indeed, Chang Kai Shek offered Nationalist Chinese troops to the United Nations effort and the US rejected them, for obvious reasons. China, unlike the United States, does not maintain troops in North Korea, and of course, it doesn't need to. Its interests can be perfectly served simply by keeping its troops inside of China. Chances are high that China's promise to North Korea is limited to keeping North Korea from losing a war alone, and perhaps with the implied threat that if North Korean launches one, it's not saving it. Today China would not be strategically threatened by the Republic of Korea extending north to the Yalu and it knows it. Indeed, it might be economically aided by having an economically strong, Finlandized, Republic of Korean that was north and south of the 38th Parallel. It probably would be. North Korea probably knows that. Indeed, in the context of the current situation, chances are high that North Korea is looking more and more to Russia, which has its own interests simply in being disruptive towards the United States and Japan, and less, to the extent it can afford it, to Red China. That Red China and Russia would not be in any sort of significant coordination seems fairly apparent. Be that as it may, there's a strong chance that China has been the brake on North Korean aggression and the lack of certainty about its willingness to save North Korea may cause it to hesitate to act.
But the bomb would cure all that.
With an atomic bomb, of any type, North Korea can lay safe under its own umbrella, a nuclear one. It can launch a conventional strike against the South and use the bomb in any sort of threatening ways. It might simply indicate, should thinks go bad, that if South Korean or American troops go north of the 38th Parallel it will use nuclear weapons to its fullest capability, in a sort of Hitler in the bunker moment. That's the most likely scenario. Or it might threaten more broadly, say threatening the United States not to use air assets against North Korea, although that's a bluff that would likely be called so that's likely not it.
Can we say that is what North Korea wants nuclear weapons for. No. We don't know what their thinking is.
Could that be their thinking?
It certainly could be.
How likely is it?
Fairly likely.
Here's why.
North Korea's economic fortunes are declining measurably with each passing year. Its Communist neighbor to the north is communist now in name only. The Soviet Union, its original Communist supporter, is now twenty seven years in its grave, replaced by a quasi democratic Russian imperialistic republic that has its own interests, but only that, at heart. To the South a nation that started out only marginally economically superior to the North has now so far outstripped it that an original hope that South Korean Communists, of whom there were once quite a few (the Republic of Korea fought a vicious guerrilla war against communist between World War Two and the Korean War), are now long gone, replaced by South Koreans who have more in common with urbanites form western cities around the globe than they do with their peasant cousins to the north. South Koreans, in fact, are rapidly losing interest in North Korea. North Korea, for its part, is on an economic curve that requires to rely on temper tantrums (the common reason most people think it wants the bomb) which are now no longer working. If North Korea is going to reunite the Korean Peninsula it is going to have to do it by force, and very soon. That would give it a new lease on life, in some ways, for at least another twenty to thirty years, maybe. Alternatively, North Korea is in the ICU and passing away, and will do so within the next fifteen years or so.
With that calculation, why not strike?
Well, China, that's why.
Get the bomb, however, and China is no longer a concern. North Korean might not be able to win a conventional war with the South, but it likely would figure it couldn't lose one either, backed up by nuclear weapons.
So, if that's the case, we might actually consider that some sort of preventative strike is prudent.
So what are our options?
The Options
They are, is so far as I can tell, the following:
1. Do nothing.
Neville Chamberlin, he opted to attempt to satiate Hitler and has forever been condemned for it.
Joseph Stalin at Potsdam. Evil, calculating, and a man who committed major blunders and achieved major successes. Some of both came from doing nothing.
Doing nothing is an option. Often its the best option.
But it's not an option here unless you want to go down in history as another Neville Chamberlain.
Or maybe Stalin in a good way (if a person can actually say that).
Eh?
Every since 1939 the world's leaders have proclaimed "never again". And its been a huge success. Germany has not invaded a neighbor since World War Two.
Oh, that's not what we meant?
Well, in that case, we've forgotten the lesson inaction and appeasement plenty of times and that's the real risk here.
Rwanda anyone?
Czechoslovakia will slate the Nazi apatite, right?
You get the point.
There are plenty of apologist right now claiming the overgrown baby that rules, and I mean rules, North Korean can be trusted after he has the bomb. He can't. He can't be trusted day to day. He kills members of his own military's senior leadership, and in bizarre really sick ways.
The "rational" analysis is that North Korea desired ICBMs as that will allow it to defend itself as a problem child state. It would, in that it would likely make it immune from conventional attack, but that will also mean that it will use it to protect itself against reaction to greater global misbehavior than it already engaged in, and that's even before we consider the possibility that Kim Jong-un has calculated that he has to attack the south, and soon.
There's nothing to say the desperate brat, or just an unrealistic one, won't launch a war against the South at some point, while threatening that if anyone intervenes, or at least crosses into the North, it'll nuke everyone. We've set this out above, and its a real possibility.
And even if he doesn't do that, he may threaten to do so, and really mean it. After all, if the leaders of the Stalinist day care decide that they'd do well by simply taking the South, which of course they've tried to do before, as discussed above, and which they've prepared to do now for decades, as we've discussed above, what's to stop them from demanding reunification on their terms, followed by a conventional invasion backed up by a "don't intervene back or we'll nuke you" policy? We've discussed this immediately above, and its a very real possibility.
He is, after all, a Communist in the mold of the worst of them. And they have never minded killing droves for their own purposes.
So that's not a very good option unless we "accommodate" ourselves to nuclear blackmail.
Maybe.
On the other hand, perhaps if we know something or suspect something that the public doesn't generally know, maybe just waiting it out is the best option.
I referenced Stalin above as an example, and he provides us with a Korean example. Contrary to what was believed at the time, Stalin didn't suggest to Kim Il-sung that he invade South Korea. No, when Kim came up with that on his own, he simply said "okay". His saying okay was in fact fairly rational as the United States had only just prior to that indicated that South Korea wasn't in its "sphere of influence", so Stalin's licensing of the gamble wasn't really poorly thought out. It turned out to be wrong, but only because guessing what American foreign policy is from moment to moment is pretty tough. We change dour minds about South Korean once North Korea attacked it, as it looked to us that this was a Soviet backed strike that put Japan in jeopardy. So we intervened, really, to save Japan.
When things went bad for North Korea Stalin did. . .nothing. He just let it play out. And that worked out okay, as it turned out. Other countries were willing to do something, and they did.
We could do that as well. We could gamble that the heat is going to get turned up to high and something will happen. And that something would probably be China. Maybe it would be a domestic uprising. Maybe a North Korean general who learns he's lost favor puts a bullet in Kim's head rather than risk being strapped to a missile. Maybe a disgruntled private let's loose with a magazine of 7.62x39. Maybe the country just disintegrates into chaos.
Or maybe not.
2. We could invade North Korea.
US Armored vehicles in South Korea, 1987.
That's a shocking statement, but we could. We and the Republic of Korean have more than ample forces to run over the midget manned Stalinist model army of North Korea. Not that it wouldn't be bloody, but frankly it wouldn't be as bloody as typically predicted. North Korea's army is, at best, a remnant of the early 1960s and ours, and South Korea's, are not.
But China's isn't either. And its huge.
And that would be the problem. Right now, anyhow, it seems pretty clear that a true armed invasion of the north would result in a Chinese intervention, just like in 1950. And we don't want to fight the Chinese.
The Chinese don't want to fight us either, FWIW, in spite of all its bluster. There's no real way to know right now how the Chinese armed forces measure up. They might be great, or they might be second rate. Indeed, they're likely second rate but really big second rate.
But invading other countries is never really a great option unless you have no other choice whatsoever and war is immanent. Indeed, under the Just War Theory, which we'll get to later, it might not be regarded as a just war for that matter, which will get to in a moment.
And all of our recent invasions, and surprisingly, given how generally view such things, we've done four since the Vietnam War, have been problematic. Oh, sure, Grenada and Panama worked out, but that's not even remotely similar. The invasion of Iraq still hasn't worked out really, and our intervention in Afghanistan, a type of invasion, hasn't worked out to the end of things yet either.
I'm not suggesting an invasion of North Korea would be like any of those. Far from it. Fighting the North Koreans even without a Chinese intervention on their behalf would be a much bloodier affair, but it would like be sharply violent and then over. The fighting would be worse but the end quicker. The point is you don't rally know where such things end up. Starting wars is one thing, accurately depicting where they end is quite another.
And it would be risky.
Besides, when I say "we", in this context, the we would include a lot more South Korean troops than American ones. The United States only maintains a single division in South Korea, the 2nd Infantry Division. They serve, really, as a tripwire to American commitment, the theory being that the United States will fight to save South Korea if the North invades if for no other reason other than that we would have lost men right from the onset. The biggest part of our contribution, if there was an invasion of the north, would come from air assets. But the simple fact of the matter is that modern South Korea, unlike the South Korea of the 1950s and 1960s, isn't going to invade its northern neighbor under any circumstances.
So, in the end, that option doesn't really exist anyway.
3. Targeted strikes. . . of all types.
The Israeli option, basically.
This is likely our best military option, maybe our only realistic option, and we're likely already engaging in it if we take into account that in the modern world such strikes aren't just ballistic, but electronic. But if we were deploying the latter, and its a good guess that we were, it's now failed.
Indeed, it's not only failed, but it sort of suddenly failed, which suggest that North Korea has had assistance from somebody who is really sophisticated in hydrogen weapons. This is, in fact, almost certainly the case, and that assistance almost certainly came from China, Russia, or Pakistan. I'd rule out Pakistan as it seems unlikely and Chinese assistance would appear unusually risky and foolish, so Russia seems like the likely candidate, or perhaps some rogue element in Russia.
Why, we might ask, would the Russians do that?
Well, Putin seems charged by Cold War fantasies and this is a problem for the United States. Beyond that, it's not only a problem for us, but potentially for China.
Russia has always had a strong impulse to mess around on the Korean peninsula. This has survived from the imperial regime, to the communist one, to the current one (whatever it is). Buying favors and frustrating the US and China at small costs, right now, to Russia is a possible goal of that.
Anyhow, if we elected to use this option, we would have to do so very soon and it will very soon involve the use of kinetic energy. I.e, at some point, probably basically almost right now, we're going to have to strike North Korean missile infrastructure in a heavy conventional way.
Fortunately for us, our conventional weaponry has become so precise we've actually retired some nuclear weapons simply because they can't achieve anything that a conventional weapon can. For example, all the way back in the 1980s or 1990s, the U.S. Navy began to remove nuclear warheads from cruise missiles. Not because of a nuclear disarmament effort, but rather because their purpose, which was to cruise in at low altitude and strike Soviet nuclear sites, no longer required a nuclear weapon. The conventional yield and the accompanying accuracy was so high that it just wasn't necessary.
North Korea is a lot more vulnerable to this sort of thing that the Soviet Union ever was. Taken on now, the United States can probably throw the North Korean program back a year or two by way of a conventional strike of this type.
Of course, that involves a couple of things, and one is that it involves gambling. Hit hard by a conventional strike and North Korea might launch a conventional invasion of South Korea. But I doubt it. I think they'd react badly, but I don't think they'd do that.
That would likely also cause either China, or perhaps Russia, to place anti missile defense systems in North Korea, with the implicit gambling on their part that we probably don't worry much about hitting North Korean missile men, but we probably would about killing Chinese or Russian missile men. However, on that point, I suspect that the Trump administration would worry a lot more about hitting the Chinese than the Russians.
It would also involve the need for repeated application and an probably a heightened unconventional role for the Company and its fellow travelers. This would make the entire Korean Peninsula subject to a level of cold war not seen since the 1960s, and frankly probably higher there than at any point since the actual Korean War.
Hmmmm
Well what about;
4. Economic warfare.
This is the pundits campaign of choice, but even they don't seem really enthused about it, particularly if it reaches out beyond North Korea, which has a GNP slightly behind that of Shoshone Wyoming. How, really, do you hurt North Korea economically?
Well, apparently the idea is that you cut off trade with people who trade with North Korea. That would be, principally, China and Russia.
Russia's GNP is higher than Shoshone's, but its not gigantic in relative terms. Russia is already subject to a set of sanctions that appear to be having little effect and sanctions directed on it, given its size and geographic nature, may very well do nothing and might actually oddly strengthen any ties it has to North Korea. China, however, is another deal. We are so tied up with the Chinese economy that its probably unrealistic to imagine the US engaging in true economic warfare with China at this point. That would probably have to wait until China's economic erosion to its south (China's bit economic threat, given the state of its development, isn't the United State. . . it's the Indochinese nations and the Indian subcontinent). That would take years. We probably don't have years to wait on this.
Unless we're willing to engage in a full scale trade war with China, which would be something to see, to be sure, this appears to be something we'll only approach but probably not really engage in. For economic nationalist it would be a dream come true, but it would also, at least temporarily, but disruptive to the American economy in a major way. Are we willing to do that? I doubt it. Should we do that? Well, it depends, maybe we should, but we have to be prepared to deal with a great amount of economic disruption.
5. The Company.
I haven't dealt yet with unconventional special folks who have a spooky existence, but my guess is that they're at work now. The problem with this in regards to North Korea is that we've never had good luck with regime change in this fashion, which is after all a pretty spectacular result for entities that exist in the murky shadows.
Probably the only American efforts of this type that anyone can really look at are those that pertain to Persia and Chile, and if you look too closely at Chile, it doesn't hold up. We, together with the British did overthrow the government of Persia and put in place the Shah of Iran. Granted, that wasn't a great long term result but here we wouldn't have to really worry about that. I'll spare the details on that one as they don't go further to demonstrate any point relevant to this discussion.
It's often claimed that we deposed Salvador Allende in favor of Augusto Pinochet, but in truth, we didn't. So this isn't relevant. At best we were sort of dimly locally aware that things were going on there, but that doesn't amount to that much. In reality, the Chilean military deposed Allende.
Now, of course, there are all sorts of examples where forces of a small nature were favored in one Central American spat or another. Perhaps those are relevant. What those always entailed, however, was backing some horse in a regional fight. I can't see any such effort being revived in North Korea (there was in fact one during the 1950s. . . and for that matter the Communist also had one in South Korean in the 1940s and 1950s). In other words, no resistance movement is going to get rolling amongst the Korean peasantry or intelligentsia, as they're completely cowed.
Now one might get rolling amongst the North Korean professional military. No doubt the Baby Dictator is well aware of that which is why various colonels and generals have to take off their big hats and place them on the guillotine from time to time. Quite frequently, actually. But they strike me more like the Red Army of the 30s and 40s than the Portuguese army of the 1970s. I don't see them doing that.
But you never know. With a significant application of cash, they might.\
But what about the morality of it all?
Eh?
Moral and Legal Action in War and Quasi War
Yes, wars have moral rules, or they should. Whether you regard them as diplomacy by other means or duels of nations wars are governed by rules of conduct and many of those are moral rules. Otherwise, they aren't diplomacy by other means but murder.
Earliest, 6th Century, portrait of St. Augustine of Hippo.
And in the West, the only cogent set of rules regarding combat stem for St. Augustine's Just War Theory.
So we've been discussing war with North Korea.
Here we look at the Just War Theory.
An overview:
- A just war can only be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified.
- A war is just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority. Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate.
- A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient--see point #4). Further, a just war can only be fought with "right" intentions: the only permissible objective of a just war is to redress the injury.
- A war can only be just if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success. Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless cause are not morally justifiable.
- The ultimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace. More specifically, the peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been fought.
- The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.
- The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.
Okay, so those are the elements. Now, let's take those a bit
further and look at a US initiated war with North Korea (we'll get to more limited strikes in a moment). We can assume
here that a US war with North Korea which was started by the North
Koreans would be just, so we will not go into great detail on that.
Here we only look at whether, basically, we can launch a preemptive
war, or something lessor, against North Korea, justly.
- A just war can only be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified.
We likely haven't exhausted all non violent means yet. That
gets us to the topic of sanctions, mentioned above. However, assuming the other elements
of a Just War are met, we should probably concede that the likelihood
of any economic effort succeeded are extraordinary remote.
- A war is just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority. Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate.
This element is clearly met, so we need not concern ourselves further with this.
- A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient--see point #4). Further, a just war can only be fought with "right" intentions: the only permissible objective of a just war is to redress the injury.
This is the really tricky one. And therefore, we'll separate it out below.
- A war can only be just if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success. Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless cause are not morally justifiable.
There would be a reasonable chance of success, maybe. Or would there?
For
what it's worth, North Korea, relying upon the assumption of Chinese
aid, would likewise have a reasonable chance of success.
The ROK and US chances are however considerably higher. The US and ROK forces can undoubtedly defeat the North Korean forces under any circumstances. The only thing that would prevent a complete victory would be, right now, Chinese intervention. The Chinese would likely quickly intervene but even at that there's some doubt as to how effective Chinese forces would in fact be.
The economic disruption, to the globe, would be massive however.
- The ultimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace. More specifically, the peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been fought.
This begs the question a bit as we're at peace right now. Launching a war to preserve and establish a more perfect peace is counter intuitive for good reason.
Perhaps for that reason, in modern times, people have debated whether a strike to prevent being stricken is a moral option at all. If it is, a party has to be almost certain that they're going to be hit and therefore are merely exercising a strategic option.
Are we sure?
You and I can't be, as we don't have the information that presumably the government does. But we also should concede that people have to act on the state of the knowledge they have at the time, not retrospectively. That knowledge is often flat out wrong. So, while it could be that North Korea's goals in obtaining a nuclear weapon are merely defensive in the conventional sense, we might erroneously believe that war is certain and that we should act first. That wouldn't make us wrong in the act, even if we were wrong in the assumption.
- The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.
This ties into the element we've set out above, so we'll also reconsider this below.
- The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.
The United States has gotten extraordinary good at this. Therefore we can assume that this element would be satisfied.
What about the two reserved questions, therefore.
- A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient--see point #4). Further, a just war can only be fought with "right" intentions: the only permissible objective of a just war is to redress the injury.
- The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.
You and I can't be that certain, but we can't dismiss it either. And we need to keep in mind that even the best informed in the intelligence community can be wrong in their assessments.
But, if we reached the pint where we were pretty certain that the North was going to launch a war, then we would, it seems to me, have to seriously consider striking first and that we would have at least a plausible argument that doing so was a moral act.
But that won't occur.
And the reason is that South Korea is almost certainly not going to use its army in that fashion. Even if war with the North in the immediate or near future was a sure certainty, I can't see the modern Republic of Korea doing that.
Nor can I see Congress authorizing it by way of a Declaration of War. Congress has forgotten where that clause of the Constitution is anyhow and I can't see Congress authorizing a war by declaration until the mushroom clouds were driving over the High Sierras. Of course, modern Presidents have maintained that they somehow are entitled to launch major wars without a Declaration. They're wrong, but would President Trump be the first President since Franklin Roosevelt to remember that a President has to ask Congress to declare war? Well, that's hard to say as he's hard to predict. Maybe he would.
And that leads us to war by lessor means. I.e., the Israeli option. Or in other words, perhaps target strikes and covert operations. Can those be justified?
If a full scale war can be, then surely they can be as well. But what if the certainty is much smaller. What if its only a hunch?
Now that's hard to say. And that may be all we have to go on. Any time a weapon is used, even in a pinpoint way, people die, and that's a grim reality that should be taken into account every time.
All of which, I suppose, argues for trying to really figure out what Kim Jong-un, the Communist boy king of the northern Hermit Kingdom is up to, and very soon.
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*When France ceded independence to Algeria it argued at first that it should retain the Saharan region of what is now Algeria. That seems odd in retrospect and has been generally regarded that way, but in fairness to France, the Algerian populace's connection with Sahara was in fact remote as it was, and is, empty. The claim was purely geographic, with thin demographic and cultural claim to the vast region. The regions of the Pacific in which the United States conducted nuclear tests early in the Cold War were actually much more inhabited than the Sahara, and the long lasting impact has been leagues greater on the native populations.
**That is that politically Algeria was regarded not as an overseas colony, but rather as an overseas element of France. I.e., it was prat of France, in France's political system, but not one in which the residents had full equal political rights with Europeans.
***Particularly with those very closely associated with the development of nuclear weapons, including members of the Manhattan Project, there were those who were horrified by the nature of the weapons themselves. While there were few outside of that circle, there were at least a very few high up in the Roosevelt/Truman administrations, and the military, who likewise viewed atomic weapons as something new and horrible. These individuals generally advocated for a demonstrative use of the weapon, a concept that was rejected.
****This came during a period of time during which there was an increase in concern that the Soviet Union would launch a conventional invasion of Europe.
That concern had always existed but after the US defeat in the Vietnam War there was a period of time during which the American Army suffered in quality while the Soviet's improved. By the late 1970s there was a serious concern that the US was regarded as so second of rate military power that that the Soviets could simply overrun NATO and take Western Europe. Late in the Carter Administration this sort of concern lead to the development of the neutron bomb as a battlefield thread to massed Soviet concentrations. The Soviets made it plain that they'd regard the use of that weapon as a full scale nuclear strike and its development was halted. During the Reagan Administration it was briefly revived.
More significantly, however, the Reagan Administration saw the full scale technological leap that would characterize the US military to the present day. Determining that a volunteer military would never be able to go toe to toe with the Red Army if each nations equipment was roughly the same, the decision was made to invest heavily in conventional military equipment technology. In many ways this had the ancillary effect of actually making some classes of nuclear weapons simply obsolete, the conventional weapons became so effective. During the 1980s the Navy, for example, withdrew nuclear tipped cruise missiles in some instances in favor of conventional tipped ones, as the conventional ones were so accurate that they could take out a nuclear missile silo with accuracy and heavy conventional ordinance alone.
*****A common North Korean belief attaches divine attributes to Kim Il-Jung actually giving him deity status, making the North Korean regime a bizarre exception to the Communist world in that not only does the regime tolerate a degree of religious worship of the country's founder, sort of on the Japanese emperor model of old, but it's also effectively a monarchy in how power passes from one generation to the next.
^In the category of adding insult to injury, quite a few of the first Red Chinese troops committed to North Korea were actually Nationalist Chinese POWs who had been conscripted into Red Chinese units, usually more or less intact. When these units went into North Korea the Red Chinese were not particularly concerned if they were killed. Interestingly, quite a few of them even retained the same equipment that they'd been issued during World War Two including Mauser K98k carbines, a weapon that was definitely not standard otherwise to the Red Chinese army.
