Why Kim Jong-Un would not be irrational to use a nuclear bomb first
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Pyongyang’s conventional inferiority requires it to degrade the United States’ ability to sustain the attack against it. This means it essentially has no option but to use nuclear weapons first against targets such as Andersen Air Force Base in Guam…
Pyongyang can’t affect the US’ ability to respond in any meaningful way. Even if Guam sinks into the sea, there’s still South Korea, Japan, ICBs & the US Navy. On top of that, there’s no guarantee that North Korea could even hit Guam without getting intercepted, and trying but failing would certainly means a massive counterattack.
I think the big new issues with a Nuclear North Korea is probably proliferation related. North Korea has a tiny economy with exports of just 4-5bn, less than a small US city. Selling an occasional bomb could triple their exports bring in foreign currency, which they are starving for. Even if they got caught, would the US respond to a nuclear armed country?
I'd expect the European countries to do the same.
The part about the US absorbing an attack on a territory or nuclear umbrella ally is flimsy too. More to the point, it’s flimsier because of their “conventional inferiority.” The US actually can degrade North Korea's abilities (to put it lightly), possibly to the point of complete failure before sustaining an attack. It's dangerous for the US, but nothing like a conflict with a Major Power.
1. Those deficiencies in North Korea's capabilities will not remain fixed for much longer if the status quo persists.
2. The scenario outlined I believe assumes that the regime's continuity is already under some active threat, so it may not care much about the massive counter attack.
However, they do not (yet) have the ability to safely make this assumption. Their missile launchers and nuclear weapon facilities would be obliterated immediately by the absolute air superiority of any possible aggressor (SK, USA, China, Russia).
I believe that their nuclear weapon program has the simpler goal to prevent limited SK and US aggressions such as aerial bombardments by continually threatening to retaliate against Seoul. This threat is fairly irrational, because it would likely trigger a nuclear response, so they seem to currently follow a "mad dog" strategy.
Not that I would know, though; I'm not a military analyst.
I think it's much more likely NK will try to last the first couple of weeks while China and Russia move hardware into the region.
His response: 1) I knew they were there. 2) I would not have recommended to Cruschtschow, I did recommend to use them. 3) What would have happened to Cuba? We would have been totally destroyed!
I think this story should be kept in mind when trying to predict behavior, esp. when the stakes are this high.
[1] Retold by Robert S. McNamara in "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/
But, presumably Castro was still playing the game even in 1992 ...at least in his mind. What was he going to say? I was bluffing.. I had to do what The Secretary told me to do.
Russia is said to be currently supplying arms to the taliban. Their goal there (to disrupt american efforts) would be the same as in NK. And China is NKs ally today, and has said they would assist if the US restarted the war (except if NK uses nuclear weapons). Both helped them during the Korean war. Both share a border with NK, making it easy for them to do so again. And both have been clear they don't want a pro-american state at their border (in Russia's case, on their western border).
If war breaks out, it's very likely it'll be NK+China+Russia again (unless there's a very clear wrong by NK). In other words, NK will likely have more military options than the article admits once a war breaks out.
But if NK uses nuclear weapons, that may change. Would China and Russia continue to back someone who used them? That's the question, and it's not a given that they would.
And of course, the original supplier of arms to the people who formed the Taliban was the United States. The goal for the US was to arm and empower the Islamic extremists who had launched a jihad against the secular Afghan government, and to disrupt Russian efforts to support it.
You aren't really improving my confidence in American military strategy.
The question is: would russia (who has mostly stayed out of the NK issue) intervene on NKs side. I'm saying they would for all of the reasons I listed. And their willingness to intervene in a conflict they have little geopolitical interested in (compared to NK), is an indication of their willingness to do so in other conflicts.
But large parts of the Mujahideen were actually part of the Northern Alliance that fought against the Taliban until liberation in 2002.
The CIA reactivated many of the same contacts from the Soviet war in 2001 to help them against the Taliban.
The article specifically talks about retaliation against military attacks by the US i.e. the article never suggests it would be rational to fire a nuke off as a "first" move, but rather simply fire them before the US does. The title is quite unclear in that regard.
Actually it does:
This scenario to stave off an invasion with a limited nuclear attack on a U.S. military target is not irrational, although it is clearly risky and terrifyingly tragic. One wrinkle is that North Korea’s arsenal is currently small and vulnerable, and U.S. military strategy, reiterated by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, is to try to find and destroy all of Kim’s nuclear systems in the event of a war. That gives Kim an incentive to go first, go early and go massively if he is not confident about surviving a U.S. attempt at disarming him. If Kim thinks we are coming after him or his forces, he cannot afford to be wrong and he cannot afford to launch second.
That last sentence is key, so if you're skimming this comment, go back and read it.
To summarize: The basic thesis is that, if Kim believes an attack is coming (not that it has started, that it is simply coming), his rational choice is to use nuclear arms on bases in the region and thus force the US to the negotiating table.
I don't know what kinds of interception technology is deployed in the area, but I would guess there is some and I would also guess that a (hypothetical) NK ICBM would not have significant countermeasures.
I think the real question here is what NK/Kim's aims are. When Iran was actively developing a nuclear capability, it seemed clear that their goal was to get as close to a weapon as possible without actually finishing a weapon. The closer they were, the more bargaining power they had in terms of getting the US/UN to lift sanctions.
With NK, I'm less clear about strategy. In the past, it seemed like NK actions had the aim of extorting aid money from the US/allies. That may still be the case. Here's a chart showing US humanitarian aid to NK since 2001: https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/PRK
To put it in context, it was fired into space, over the part of the world where Japan resides. Changes the narrative quite a bit.
But the US missile defense has never seen combat.. only tests. They had 10 successful tests (the last 10) out of 18. But those are planned ahead of time (with trajectories already mapped out), and the missiles don't have countermeasures (which they would in a real conflict). So there's a big question about whether the system will work at all. I don't think anyone is eager to find out.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-usa-d...
Any resulting peace treaty would be of China accepting Taiwan independence, dropping all support for North Korea and giving all ambitions to the South China sea. China has a lot to lose if it went to war against the United States.
I will add, the US military may not be the largest in the world by manpower, but it is the best equipped, best trained and has a world wide network of allies and military bases. Certain parts of the US military are the largest, for example, the US Air Force is the largest and best equipped air force in the world. The second largest is the US Navy.
The only thing China has going for it is that it is not only geographically large, but also has a huge population.
If they openly turned hostile against the US like that, then their economy would have to do without much export trade in a short amount of time, months instead of decades. Doable, but a mess, and it's not clear that the initial domestic support the current regime would enjoy from a war would outweigh and outlast the longer term economic adjustments to be made. They're trying to pivot away from exports at the moment, but it's pretty addictive.
I tend to buy more into arguments that the PRC enjoys the cognitive/attention bandwidth NK occupies within US leadership, and if NK happens to first strike US, successfully or not, the resulting chaos would net benefit the PRC's global power position. They keep the benefit of a buffer state by insisting the US not take pre-emptive action, while simultaneously refusing to take stronger action (using the avoidance of absorbing a NK humanitarian crisis as shield) against NK, yet not actively help NK beyond the current nominal assistance levels, so I don't see significant downsides for the PRC and RUS to let the status quo reign.
I suspect the PRC's unofficial statement that if NK struck first, then the PRC would not oppose a US reaction, is a thinly-veiled threat to the US: even if you or an ally absorb a nuclear first strike, you're not going to replace our buffer state. We'll intervene to topple the Kim regime, perhaps even help you do that, and then we'll ensure we control the agenda going forward of what emerges to replace that regime in NK.
Before we get all doom and gloom over ICBMs, the chances are greater NK will ship a nuclear bomb to the US inside an ISO shipping container crossing in by ship, train or truck than lobbing it with a missile. The difficulties from this point in their ICBM development program are still substantial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A00QWVHem3A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elEh4EBrqTQ
I agree with other comments here that the bigger, long-term threat is nuclear proliferation. We might successfully enter a MAD scenario with NK, only to get clocked by a Hezbollah-assembled device painstakingly purchased and gleaned from multiple sources including NK among the list. It's not even the materiel or finished devices that has me wondering as much as the practical knowledge that sits in scientists', engineers' and technicians' heads. We could magic away all of NK's nuclear infrastructure, and that still won't solve the problem of they have all these people that know the how-to's of building the devices. That's going to be a tough problem to solve.
I'd guess that you can drop enough rice to feed the population of NK for around $1-2bil/mo. The cost of the Iraq war was around $8-10bil/mo. So you're talking about 10-25% of the cost of a war effort. (I'd guess towards the higher side.)
But! There's a lot of goodwill to be earned by dropping a steady supply of food across the country during the conflict. At the end of the day, starving people usually care more about food than kings. (Also, for marginally more you can include other kinds of supplies.)
It's kind of hard to hide that there's also bombs being dropped, so it doesn't seem like claiming it's tribute would be effective. Claiming that it's poisoned might be viable -- but with enough starving people, someone is going to try it, and some number are going to decide (when it doesn't kill that person, because it isn't poison) that a slow poison is better than fast starvation.
It just seems that NK (and a number of other places) keep large segments of the population in near starvation and/or slavery, and suddenly throwing surplus food across the whole country does a lot to disrupt the economics of that. How many people are putting up with NK bullshit because it's the only way to survive?
I'm not saying "rice not bombs", I'm saying "25% less bombs, 100% more rice" is probably an effective trade-off in warfare, even in wealthy areas, because many citizens aren't prepared for serious, sustained armed conflicts and you save yourself a lot of trouble if the populace doesn't hate you for generations when the bombing stops.
I do not support their regime, but I also do not support everyone ganging up on them and deciding that military invasion and mass slaughter is somehow the solution. Like with any country, change is slow and has to come from within.
That wasn't the case with Japan and Germany during WWII. They both went from militaristic, imperialistic societies to pacifist ones in a relatively short amount of time. And that change was the result of their being utterly and completely defeated in a bloody war, and the occupations that followed.
Uh, yeah, that was pretty much my whole point. I was refuting your statment, "change is slow and has to come from within." Major changes in a country are not necessarily slow, and do not have to come from within.
I don't see how any intelligent person could think that I am arguing that based on what I wrote. I think it is obvious what I was arguing, however I'll try to make it as clear as possible. I was arguing that your statement, to wit:
>Like with any country, change is slow and has to come from within
Is simply false.
Also the countries you mention from WW2 don't really apply in this case as they attacked first, and if NK attacked first I'd expect us to of course reply in force.
Then that's what you should have said.
(At that point MIT was still heavily into public policy rather than entrepreneurship. Though I am far, far from libertarian, that orientation also seemed outdated at the time).
They can be hidden pretty easily.
I'm perplexed that you're perplexed. The article does a good job of laying out their argument. In short: The claim is that Kim believes the US wouldn't "retaliate so savagely" because the US wouldn't be willing to risk losing a major populated area to a successful ICBM strike.
So preemptive nuclear strikes on local bases make sense to degrade the US's ability to stage a conventional invasion, while acting as a deterrent by threatening a strike on the domestic US.
You can choose to believe or not believe that argument (it depends on your measure of risk in that scenario), but the logic is clear and reasonable.
There are two styles of attack: "conventional" (bombers, soldiers, etc. but no nukes) and "nuclear".
A successful conventional attack on NK could quickly remove its ability to initiate a nuclear attack. Without too much trouble, the US or some other major power could send a bunch of bombers over and completely eradicate NK's nuclear arsenal.
NK may be able to prevent a conventional attack by making a pre-emptive nuclear attack on foreign military targets. I say "may" because I think this is the least-justified claim of the article.
Doing that would not provoke the same kind of international response that a nuclear attack on NK would. If we blew up a base or two in NK, we could say, "We're just try to keep the world safe." and most other countries probably wouldn't do much about it except maybe some stern looks of disapproval.
This means that a conventional attack on NK is more likely, since there is less disincentive for it.
NK has no real ability to respond conventionally. We could take out their entire military without breaking a sweat. Their only noteworthy weapon is nukes. That means they must be preserved at all costs.
So Kim Jong-Un knows:
1. A conventional attack can remove NK's nuclear capability.
2. A nuclear strike on military bases may prevent that conventional attack.
3. NK's nuclear capability is their only weapon against other countries so must be preserved at all costs.
Those logically imply that if NK is to engage in any military conflict, it must strike first with nuclear weapons. Anything else results in defeat.
Add to that:
4. A conventional attack is more likely because there would be fewer repercussions on other countries for doing so.
Combine those together and it implies an NK nuclear first strike on military targets is more likely.
This presumes you believe 2 and 4 to be true. I think 4 probably is true -- the world generally seems to roll over when the US marches troops into random countries, even under dubious justification (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.).
I don't believe 2 is true. Even if NK used every nuke they got on every base they can reach, I think the US and its allies would still have so much remaining military capability that we could turn the entire country into a glowing slag heap and still be home in time for the weekend.
The article basically postulates that any state with nuclear weapons guarantees its basic territorial integrity. That means sure, we might have landed in Normandy and secured France and the USSR might've secured Poland, but the German heartland would've been a no-go for the Allies for fear of a nuke to Paris or London, and a safe-zone for Hitler and his agenda for Jews, etc.
There would not be time for public debate. The US would respond within minutes of a move like that.
Consider Iraq. Hussein apparently believed the West would eventually believe him when he said he had no weapons of mass destruction. Instead he was killed.
Why would any future dictator facing escalation from the west play along? Playing along now has a proven risk of getting you killed.
The argument then is that to someone like Kim Jong-Un it may feel like the only alternative is to be so unhinged and so willing to escalate that the price of taking him out is too great for anyone to want to take it.
Of course it's a tricky line - overplay your hand and you seem so unhinged that nobody can afford to let you live.
Libya's Gaddafi did play along though, and still got killed by the US anyway, so the analysis is still correct even though the example illustrating it is wrong.
If you look at Bush's approval ratings, you can see the incentive he had to fight his reelection campaign in the context of a military response to 9/11. That was the reason for the invasion.
The West didn't care about the facts of his having WMD or not.
Now, we're paying the price of a capricious attitude to regime change in other countries: nothing that can be said will persuade NK that it isn't in existential danger.
There's a standard joke that may be close to the truth. The joke goes, a US official said: "Of COURSE we knew that Saddam had chemical weapons because we still had the receipts from when we sold those weapons to him.", rough quote. The implication was that the US sold chemical weapons to Saddam for Saddam to use against Iran in the Iraq-Iran war.
In Gulf War II, George W. Bush, Bush 43, invaded Iraq, occupied the country, captured Saddam, and let some Iraqis put Saddam on trial and hang him, all for whatever reasons Bush said or believed and didn't say or whatever.
There are various candidate reasons; here are 10 such:
(1) The attack on the US on 9/11/2001 early in Bush's first term made Bush eager to defend the US against terrorism. There were claims, and maybe Bush believed them, that Saddam was working with Al Qaeda on more such terrorist attacks on the US.
(2) There were claims that Saddam had started to make biological and/or chemical weapons of his own and so hated the US that he might try to deploy such, via terrorism or whatever, on the US. Bush wanted thorough inspections of Iraq, but Saddam didn't cooperate which made Bush suspect that Saddam was trying to get and deploy such weapons against the US. Part of the issue of did Saddam cooperate were claims that Saddam had shipped biological and/or chemical weapons to some valleys in Syria to evade US and/or UN inspectors and later to retrieve the weapons for use against the US.
(3) Like (2) except for nuclear weapons.
(4) Saddam was a brutal dictator using tactics borrowed from Stalin. Maybe Bush wanted to stop that.
(5) Saddam used chemical weapons against the Kurds in Iraq. Maybe Bush wanted to stop, retaliate against Saddam for that, or conclude from that that Saddam was so evil he should be killed.
(6) Saddam was not obeying the rules stated at the end of Gulf War II.
(7) Saddam had some sons who were nasty.
(8) There were claims that Saddam tried to kill Bush 41 and that Bush 43 wanted to retaliate.
(9) Bush 43 saw Saddam as being cruel to the people of Iraq, said that "The Iraqi people are perfectly capable of defending themselves", and maybe wanted to make that possible. For the invasion in Gulf War II, the US military did capture Baghdad, occupy the country, and guide Iraq to create a new constitution and hold held national elections; the US did all of that quickly. Maybe then Bush thought that the US could leave Iraq quickly, but, no, there was an insurgency, and essentially it is still going on.
(10) Saddam built several palaces in Iraq, and maybe Bush thought that such palaces were improper and that Saddam should be killed for that.
At the end of Gulf War I, US General Schwarzkopf knew that he could take Baghdad and occupy Iraq, quickly, especially if the rest of the coalition would go along but did not want to do that and believed that the coalition would not go along. Five years later in an interview in a two hour program by Frontline, Schwarzkopf said that if the US had occupied Iraq, then that would have been expensive "and, by the way, we would still be there", IIRC. Yup. And we still are.
In Gulf War I, Schwarzkopf, and likely essentially all the coalition, wanted (A) to drive Iraq OUT of Kuwait and (B) to destroy the Iraqi military as an offensive force and, in particular, destroy or weaken the Iraqi Republican Guard, a main pillar of Saddam's power in Iraq. Schwarzkopf accomplished (A) thoroughly and (B) well enough for himself and, then, wanted himself, the coalition, the US military, and the US OUT of Iraq, that is, just leave Iraq to the Iraqis for whatever outcome that might be, pretty, ugly, whatever.
So, in short, at the end of Gulf War I, Schwarzkopf clearly saw that for the US to occupy Iraq would be a big mistake. But later Bush 43 did just that.
Edit: when I said one shot I was referring to being right or wrong about if you would be attacked or not. I was not referring to nuclear missile shots.
The urgent purpose of the defensive parts are to deter Kim from shooting at the US, SK, Japan, Guam, Australia, England, .... Here the message is clear: If Kim explodes a nuke, the US will respond so that Kim's first nuke will he his last one.
For the defensive parts, he has been pursuing UN sanctions and lining up other countries against NK. He has positioned off the coasts of NK a Nimitz class aircraft carrier, several smaller ships, an attack submarine (in case Kim does something hostile with a submarine), and an Ohio-class missile firing submarine (SSBN) (in case Kim explodes a nuke). Apparently the British are sending a ship with some Mach 3 missiles maybe able to destroy an ICBM during launch or boost phase. Trump has positioned USAF planes at least in Guam and maybe in other west Pacific bases and held joint exercises with SK. He has authorized SK and Japan to buy some more advanced US weapons and has authorized SK to have more throw weight on their missiles (somehow the US retains some legal rights, soon to end, over SK from the Korean War). SK has been deploying US THAAD anti-missile systems. The US has been testing its anti-ballistic (ABM) systems, the ones designed to intercept a warhead during reentry.
Trump had a White House meeting on NK with Mattis and Dunford and likely also Kelly, McMaster, and others and then had Mattis, with Dunford, make a strong statement that, to translate, if NK exploded a nuke then the US would make that first nuke the last one, and for this the US has several options, some nuclear, some non-nuclear.
So, maybe for such largely defensive steps Trump's goal is to keep Kim from exploding a nuke right away.
So, there are geographical rings from SK to Japan, Guam, and the US, e.g., short range defenses and long range defenses. And there are diplomatic layers from SK, China, Russia, the UN, the US, other countries, etc.
For offense, Trump claims he talked with Xi and got him to say that he agreed that NK should not have nukes.
It looks like Trump has decided that NK will not have missiles or nukes. If Kim wants to give up missiles and nukes peacefully, then maybe that will be enough. Otherwise Trump will work to have the missiles and nukes destroyed, to have Kim removed from office, say, moved out of the country and/or killed, and to have the NK military equipment, e.g., rockets, artillery, guns, trucks, submarines, other ships, etc. destroyed.
The US Navy Seals have been training with some SK soldiers on how to take out someone, likely Kim, like the Seals took out UBL. Broadly it begins to look like the US and SK have decided that SK will do most of the fighting.
So, maybe a fight would go: (A) The Seal trained SK soldiers cross into NK and kill and/or capture Kim. (B) Enough of the NK leadership and military command and control will be captured or destroyed to stop NK from shooting missiles, artillery. (C) SK will launch some hyper accurate missiles at the NK missiles ready to be launched. (D) The SK army, backed from the air by the USAF and Navy, will invade NK, take over the government and missile and nuke infrastructure and destroy that infrastructure. (E) China has troops on the NK border to keep NK civilians from entering China. Russia may do something similar. (F) The SK army will destroy essentially all the NK military equipment, e.g., artillery. (G) SK will turn NK over to the UN and leave.
All the important steps will be over in just a few minutes or hours. Step (G) will take no more than some weeks.
Then Kim and his military, missiles, and nukes will be gone. The NK leadership in missiles and nukes will be gone. The US will never set foot in NK. There will be very few civilian deaths. Little or no radiation will be released.
All that is just a guess.