The test by North Korea this week of its biggest nuclear device yet has rattled more than the world’s seismographs. It now seems a paranoid dictator with an appalling human rights record owns the ultimate weapon.
It is particularly concerning given that the explosion, 10 times the size of the country’s previous test, may well have been the nation’s first two-stage hydrogen bomb. Such a design can pulverise a city, and is easier, per kiloton, to fit onto a missile.
Faced with this, some are suggesting that a pre-emptive strike would end the uncertainty and liberate the longsuffering North Koreans. US defence secretary James Mattis this week that “any threat to US territories (or) our allies will be met with a massive military response”.
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Responding to a “threat”, not just an actual attack, sounds pre-emptive. “We are not looking to the total annihilation of …North Korea, but we have many options to do so,” he added. That sounds nuclear.
Self-fulfilling fear
But on closer inspection, it doesn’t sound sensible. North Korea has developed its nuclear weapon to deter just such a massive attack by the US. That would be the one occasion it would be used by the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. If the US didn’t take out all North Korea’s nuclear weapons in a first strike – and given we don’t even that could be difficult – its fear of nuclear attack could become self-fulfilling.
The US would be more likely to lead with conventional weapons, says of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC. “My big concern is that North Korea would use nuclear weapons in response to a US attack,” he says. “If Kim believed his regime were in danger, such a desperate attempt to make the US back down would not be irrational.”
But even if the US got lucky and took out North Korea’s nukes in a first strike, Kim could still fight back with conventional weapons. North Korea is thought to have 10,000 to 15,000 artillery guns and more than 1000 short-range SCUD-type ballistic missiles, mostly trained on the South Korean capital Seoul, only 56 kilometres from the border, says Paul Ingram of the , a think tank in London. It also has chemical weapons.
There is over how many of Seoul’s 25 million people this arsenal could kill, but strategists say that return fire from South Korea and the US would take out the batteries in a day or two, leaving North Korea open for a ground invasion. So why have them? The guns, like the nuclear weapons, are deterrents: don’t attack us and we won’t use them.
Doomsday missiles
All this suggests a pre-emptive strike on North Korea would unleash its threat, rather than resolving it. But the real risk is the precedent a nuclear attack by either side would set.
“The primary bulwark against nuclear anarchy is the norm of non-use on battlefields,” says at the Stimson Center, a security think tank in Washington DC. “If the crisis with North Korea results in mushroom clouds, then the barrier against nuclear weapons use will be lowered for other states,” he says.
That doesn’t necessarily mean a rush of nuclear attacks. Instead, Krepon fears a global resumption of nuclear testing, resulting in smaller battlefield weapons that are more likely to be used than the huge doomsday missiles left over from the Cold War. “We [would] be opening the gates of hell,” he says.
Still, people are thinking about actually using nuclear weapons for the first time since 1945. The South Korean defence minister this week reviewing the US decision to remove its small “tactical” nuclear missiles from South Korea in 1991. US analysts have that a recently improved US warhead might destroy North Korea’s nuclear arsenal without killing many people, by detonating at an altitude too high to stir up fallout but low enough to destroy bunkers.
Such a situation, however, would almost certainly escalate, says Krepon. Other paranoid mass murderers like Stalin and Mao were kept in line by deterrence, he says, with the threat of retaliation for any nuclear attack credited with keeping the nuclear peace since 1945. Surely, the US, with 1240 nuclear warheads ready for launch, can deter a tiny country with at most a handful of them, he says. It may be unsettling to do nothing. But it may be the only way.
