I first became deeply and earnestly involved in large
questions of public policy in the Spring of 1958. The issue that engaged my energies was the
threat of nuclear war. There was a movement
then to ban nuclear weapons worldwide, led by the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament, an organization formed in Great Britain the year before and headed
up by my old teatime companion [hem hem], Bertrand Russell.
The invention of nuclear weapons had fundamentally altered
military strategy and international affairs because there was no effective
defense against them. [I explored all of
this at great length in a book I wrote four years later and failed to get
published, The Rhetoric of Deterrence.] Overnight, the age old concept of defense had been replaced by the new,
untested, and fundamentally different concept of deterrence. Since it was in
practice impossible for a nation to defend itself against the devastation of a
nuclear attack, there were only two alternatives: either all the nations that possessed nuclear
weapons or were capable of producing them had to agree – unanimously – to destroy
the weapons they had and to not produce any more, which is to say nuclear disarmament; or else a nation,
to defend itself, had to produce and maintain an arsenal of nuclear weapons
capable of being deployed even after a nuclear attack with sufficient effect to
make it not in the rational self-interest of any other nation to initiate a
nuclear war, which is to say deterrence. It took no brains at all to see that
deterrence was a very risky option, because either accident, or miscalculation,
or – worst of all – a failure of rational self-interest on the part of a nuclear
armed nation could very well result in the deaths of scores or hundreds of
millions of the residents of one’s homeland.
Which brings me to North Korea, which apparently now
possesses nuclear weapons and is actively engaged in trying to develop an
intercontinental ballistic missile [ICBM] capable of reaching the West Coast of
the United States, a distance of maybe 5000 miles. Should the North Korean development efforts
prove successful [and it is difficult to see how they could not be], it would
then be possible for Chairman Kim Jong-un to launch an attack on, let us say,
San Francisco that the United States would have no ability to stop. Such an attack would be suicidal, it goes
without saying. I think it is pretty
certain that in response the American military would obliterate North Korea
with a flood of megaton weapons, killing the Chairman, his government, and most
of the North Koreans. But that would not
save San Francisco.
For sixty years, we and the rest of the nuclear armed
nations have been relying for our lives on the rational self-interest of
all. It is not for nothing that this state
of affairs, usually referred to as mutually assured destruction, goes by the
acronym MAD.
Let us assume that Kim-Jong-un is not suicidal, that all he
wants, like Henny Youngman, is a little respect. [If this is not true, then San Francisco, or
Los Angeles, or Beijing is doomed.] The problem
is that he is engaged in a very dangerous game, making threats he does not
actually intend to carry out in an attempt to bluff the United States and other
nations into lifting sanctions, increasing aid [in the case of China], and
ceding him a seat at the councils of the nuclear nations.
Since every knowledgeable civilian and military figure in
the American government [with the possible exception of the President]
understands all of this quite well, there will be enormous pressure on them to
launch a first strike to destroy North Korea’s military establishment before
Kin Jon-un is in a position to carry out his threats -- threats which, I repeat, cannot be defended against.
We are in dangerous waters.
8 comments:
Professor Wolff:
A few things: first, they'd have to fire an ICBM with accuracy, probably no mean feat.
Second, Trump is an irrational actor. Which changes all our calculations. Maybe two irrational actors toying with nuclear missiles.
Finally, a wish that it was the mongols who possessed nuclear missiles and not the North Koreans- that would be a game changer
If I were North Korea and observed that Donald Trump was elected president of the only superpower, I'd develop missiles with a capacity to reach California myself.
Bill Maher joked that North Korea is the chihuahua in a car in the grocery store parking lot. When it first pounces at the window barking, you jump startled, only to realize that it's harmless.
I'm no fighter, but I'm pretty sure just the readers of this blog could physically overpower the emaciated, malnourished, and anemic, North Koreans. If I was NK dictator, I would stfu and be quite, because it's not even clear they could win a war against us readers, or a petting zoo, let alone the entire US of A.
If I'm North Korea and on the U.S.'s enemy list, I see that the U.S. only attacks weak and easy targets: Grenada, Nicaragua (with the contras), Panama, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan and Libya. If I have nuclear capacity while I cannot win a war against the U.S. or even against the readers of this blog, I can hurt the U.S. by launching nuclear missiles against Japan, South Korea, Hawaii and maybe now California. I assume that the Japanese and South Korean economy matter to the U.S. as do civilian casualties in Hawaii and California. An underlying premise is that the U.S. seeks world control and wants to control me (North Korea).
The question of escalation though is open ended. Beijing might decide to retaliate against the United States if the US attacks North Korea, or if the US responds. It wasn't too long ago that the US attempted to stare down Beijing in support of Taiwan. The United States blinked. It's likely that North Korea would also attack South Korea if it were launching a strike against the US. If a regional exchange occurs anywhere, the doomsday clock advances from 2 and a half minutes to within seconds of midnight. A regional nuclear conflict could easily escalate to all-out global thermonuclear war.
I'm not any kind of expert, but I would imagine that an advanced missile would not be necessary for North Korea to attack any port city in the US with a nuclear bomb stuck in some container in a cargo ship. As a first strike. It wouldn't have to be shipped directly from North Korea either. If a nuke can fit on a missile, it could fit in one of those containers easily. I hope the North Korean government would have to be suicidal to do this though. It would be the end of them and probably of a large percentage of their population. It would be a bargaining chip for them anyways. I hate thinking like this. Can't you go back to talking about how we oppose Trump?
Have you confused Henny Youngman with Rodney Dangerfield?
probably! :)
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