North Korea's Nuclear Test

North Korea's Nuclear Test
Monday 09 October 2006

It appears that North Korea has now barged into the global nuclear-weapons club by conducting a nuclear test. In the days and weeks to come, there will be much discussion about how the United States should respond. But an equally important consideration is how Washington should not respond. Some hawks have previously suggested that the United States launch air strikes against North Korea's nuclear installations and missile sites. That would be an incredibly high-risk strategy. Pyongyang might well respond with attacks on targets in South Korea and Japan, thereby triggering a general war in East Asia.

Proposals to impose an air and naval blockade on North Korea are almost as reckless. A blockade is considered an act of war under international law. Moreover, the paranoid North Korean leadership might well consider it a prelude to a U.S.-led attack and react accordingly.

America's default policy option should be to rely on deterrence and containment. A nuclear-armed North Korea is certainly an unpleasant prospect, but the United States has deterred other unsavory and volatile regimes in the past, notably Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. With thousands of nuclear weapons in our arsenal, we should be able to deter North Korea.

A better option, though, would be to encourage China to oust Kim Jong-il’s regime. Beijing has been reluctant to take that step because it fears (among other things) that the North Korean state would unravel and China would then face a united Korea allied to the United States, with a U.S. military presence on the Chinese border. Washington should assure Beijing that, if China subverts Kim’s government, the United States will withdraw its forces from the Korean Peninsula and end its alliance with South Korea. Such an offer might prove irresistibly tempting to China, and we would have found a painless way of ending the North Korea nuclear problem.