Those currently arguing that the U.S. need not go to war to disarm North Korea are relying on the assumption that the U.S. can simply deter North Korea from actually using its nuclear arsenal based on our experience with the Soviet Union & China. On the surface, this argument has a lot to recommend it. Firstly, launching missiles at us or our allies would result in the annihilation of North Korea and presumably the death of Kim Jong Un and his family. Secondly, the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) strategy was successful with the Soviet Union and has continued to be so with Russia and China. And of course, there is the inherent rationality behind it; namely why would somebody blow up their own country? So as a strategy, it is assumed that MAD is bound to work.

But what if it doesn’t?

What if after, say, 10 years of building out his nuclear arsenal and building atomic bombs that he isn’t deterred? What if his strategic calculus is different than the China and the Soviet Union? What if, unthinkably, he was willing to accept the destruction of his country? While this might not be the most likely end point of a MAD strategy pursued vis-à-vis North Korea, it is important to recognize that there are not insignificant differences between the geopolitical calculus of China & the Soviet Union/Russia on one hand and North Korea on the other.

1.)    China and the Soviet Union were geopolitical players even without nuclear weapons.

Simply by the size of their conventional military in the case of the Soviet Union and the size of their population in the case of Communist China, these two countries were going to be geopolitical players and were/are always going to be difficult (if not impossible) for the West to conquer conventionally. While they developed a nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver them, at the very least this was done in order to prevent (from their perspective) potential nuclear blackmail by the United States. But by their very size and relative geopolitical position, a nuclear exchange caused by a first strike from the Soviet Union/China that resulted in the annihilation of the United States would also have resulted in the annihilation of the Soviet Union/China as well. Because the of quasi-religious nature of communist ideology present in the Soviet Union/China, the person(s) launching a first strike wouldn’t see themselves as destroying the United States and capitalism, but rather as going down in history as the person(s) who destroyed an emerging beautiful paradise (Soviet Union/China) that was going to advance mankind to unknown heights. The goal of bringing into existence a communist paradise on earth would only be served if the United States was destroyed while its adversaries remained intact. MAD created a strategic situation where this outcome was impossible, and so there was no benefit to launching a first strike.

2.)    China and the Soviet Union are/were run by political parties, and the leadership of these countries were drawn from those ranks.

What this means is that those who arrived at the top echelons of power had moved up through the ranks, had made alliances with others, done business with others, and had developed networks and connections that reached across the country. They had, at some level, developed a certain loyalty to their friends and the population in general. Understanding that even if they survived an annihilating nuclear strike their friends (and family) would not, actually served as a deterrent at some level to launching nuclear missiles except as an extremely last resort; an act to be undertaken only if one believed oneself to be under attack & with nothing left to lose.

Unfortunately, neither condition 1 nor condition 2 is present in North Korea. Without nuclear weapons, nobody is going to give a smidgen of thought to Kim Jong Un. While analysts are asserting that he wants nukes to prevent an outside attack in order to prevent his regime from being overthrown (which is certainly a likely motivation), I think short-shrift is being given to the motivation that possessing nukes also means that a tiny country, that is weak in so many ways, actually has to be handled with a seriousness completely out of proportion to its strength in other areas. In other words, North Korea with nukes matters. North Korea without nukes doesn’t.

In addition, there is the fact that North Korea is not governed the way the Soviet Union was and China is. Kim Jong Un didn’t get his position by rising through the ranks of the Party over many years through political skill and coalition building. He was awarded the position through heredity. North Korea, for all of its pretense at being a communist society, is really a monarchy/mafia-style state.  What this ultimately means is that Kim Jong Un’s friends & family (i.e. the people who he really cares about) likely consist of a relatively small number of people; perhaps a small enough number who could be holed up in a nuclear proof bunker deep enough underground to be able to survive a nuclear attack by the United States. Why this matters is that the ability of Kim Jong Un to be deterred from launching a destructive preemptive strike on the United States, once he has the nuclear capability to do so, depends upon whether it is more important to him personally to govern over a small, insignificant but for the possession of nukes country, or whether it is more important for him to go down in history as the man who destroyed the sole (Western) superpower and therefore irrevocably changed the course of world history.

At this point then, the question moves to whether he actually could destroy the United States through a nuclear attack. The answer to this question is that he couldn’t today. But someday (perhaps in 10 or 20 years) he would be able to do so if he is allowed to grow his nuclear arsenal. Perhaps by that time missile defense technology will advance to a point to where the U.S. would be impervious to missile attack, but we are not there now. If North Korea today had 100 nuclear missiles capable of striking any point on the U.S. mainland and launched them all at once, they would have the power to destroy the U.S. Sure, missile defense would destroy a few, but not nearly all of them. Even if one in five got through, enough to blow up the 19 largest cities in the U.S. plus Washington D.C., I don’t think one needs to doubt that the U.S. would effectively cease to exist as relevant country, along with 10% of its population and much of its finance (New York), technological dynamism (Silicon Valley), energy dynamism (Houston, Dallas), industry (Los Angeles, Chicago), and government (Washington D.C.).

All of this is not to say that Kim Jong Un and his nuclear missiles can’t be deterred through a MAD strategy. It is just to say that I don’t think that this strategy is as straightforward as it might appear to be on the surface. North Korea today is a different animal than either the Soviet Union or China. The geopolitical dynamics and governing structure are completely different, and the success of a strategy of MAD depends largely on the psychology of one man; a man that we don’t have a lot of information on. A MAD strategy could still work, but it is much riskier than what one might suppose.