The global nuclear order is undergoing a series of major transformations. Russian President Vladimir Putin brandished his country's massive nuclear arsenal when he launched his unwarranted and illegal attack on Ukraine. For their part, the US and the UK announced an agreement with Australia that is likely to include the transfer of highly enriched uranium (HEU) to support a new nuclear attack submarine program in Canberra, despite the fact that both countries have committed within the G-7 to reduce the use of UAE throughout the world. These developments follow the relentless unraveling of crucial agreements, such as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran and the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, during the last US administration, in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
In such an environment, the last major crisis between the US and North Korea in 2017 now seems like history. That year, North Korea crossed important technical thresholds in its nuclear program, thresholds that the US intelligence community had feared would be reached in the mid-1990s. Kim Jong Un, the third supreme leader of the Kim dynasty in North Korea, finished the work carried out by his father and grandfather over more than four decades: he carried out the first test in history with an intercontinental ballistic missile and tested a thermonuclear weapon with a yield explosive of hundreds of kilotons. After that, in November 2017, he declared his nuclear deterrence “complete” and turned to diplomacy with South Korea and the US after his 2018 New Year's speech. The last months of 2017 became dangerous due to then US President Donald Trump's threats to attack North Korea.
What changed in 2017 was the appearance for the US of a third nuclear-armed adversary capable of threatening its territory (the 48 contiguous federal states on continental soil) with a nuclear attack. Technical experts discussed the ins and outs of North Korea's missile technology, including its reliability. However, the North Koreans, regarding the theory of deterrence, have seemed to align with Thomas Schelling, who argued that deterrence could be obtained under ambiguous conditions and capabilities, as opposed to Albert Wohlstetter, for whom the "balance of terror” underpinning deterrence was delicate and would require a large number of highly reliable capabilities. What gave Kim the confidence to declare his deterrence “complete” after just three ICBM tests in 2017 and six nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017 was not that those capabilities had been perfected or were considered highly reliable. ; it was the notion, in line with Schelling, that Pyongyang's possession of such capabilities would endow any future crisis with the US with an undeniable nuclear dimension. No US president could consider an attack on North Korea with the certainty that Pyongyang would not be capable of launching a nuclear warhead against Washington DC or New York. As much as presidential advisers claimed that the probability of a successful North Korean detonation on US soil was in the low single digits in a crisis, any US president would think long and hard before escalating against Pyongyang. After all, high-consequence events, even if they have minimal chances of materializing, tend to induce caution.
That change in 2017 marked a new experience for almost two generations of US military officials and planners. Not since Mao Zedong first tested the Chinese DF-5 intercontinental ballistic missile in 1971 has the US policy-making community faced a new adversary armed with nuclear weapons and developing the ability to reach its home turf. In the forty-six years between 1971 and 2017, the US thought about nuclear deterrence in the context of Russia and China. Iran and North Korea were causes for concern, but were largely thought of as nuclear proliferators and “rogue states”. If we jump to 2022, we see that the situation has largely not changed. Even though North Korea has massively produced ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads (something Kim called for during his 2018 New Year's speech, the very one that opened the door to diplomacy with South Korea), the world continues to treat Korea of the North as a proliferator rather than a possessor of nuclear weapons. The consequences of this framework may be dire in the long run, as the world fails to understand the importance of risk reduction with North Korea.
The proliferative framework regarding the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula dates back to the early 1990s, when US intelligence services first offered assessments that Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea, was trying to get the bomb. Under Soviet pressure, Kim had agreed to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The USSR, a major source of patronage for North Korea, would cease to exist six years after North Korea's accession to the treaty in 1985. The NPT, a cornerstone of the global nuclear order, offered its signatories a simple deal: letting Leaving aside the five states that had detonated a nuclear explosive device before January 1, 1967 (USA, USSR, France, UK and China), all would give up nuclear weapons in exchange for access to nuclear trade and civil nuclear technologies. For their part, the five nuclear-armed States would work in good faith to achieve global disarmament.
North Korea has probably never fully accepted this view. If there is a state in the international system that interprets the world order in a classical neorealist sense, it is North Korea. Global institutions are of little use to Pyongyang in a world where all countries, large and small, must do what is necessary to survive under a logic of self-help. And so, although receiving Soviet patronage was useful during the cold war, the collapse of the USSR forced drastic measures. Kim Il Sung was already fascinated with the effects of nuclear weapons in the late 1950s; he also spoke of nuclear threats after the Cuban missile crisis. In the early 1990s, North Korea's interest in nuclear weapons could finally be backed by an indigenous capability: it had a working graphite-gas reactor and two more under construction.
In 1992, the two Koreas, shortly after entering the UN together, sealed an agreement for the "denuclearization of the Korean peninsula." That language, which is still part of the international diplomatic lexicon about the Korean peninsula, referred not only to concern about a North Korean nuclear weapon, but also to US nuclear weapons on South Korean soil. In December 1991, the last US tactical nuclear weapon left the Korean peninsula. These weapons had been deployed on South Korean soil since 1958 to deter the numerically superior North Korean military from resuming the Korean War, which ended with an armistice in 1953. The 1992 joint declaration on denuclearization provided another basis to ensure the non-nuclear status of both Koreas, something that quickly ran into difficulties in the first major crisis between the US and North Korea in 1993-1994. That crisis ultimately led to the Agreed Framework, a landmark agreement that was successful in that it delayed North Korea's plutonium production for some eight years, until it fell apart during the presidency of George W. Bush, when made it clear that Pyongyang had pursued a uranium enrichment capability, thereby opening a second pathway to the bomb.
Since then, there have been two other noteworthy diplomatic episodes with North Korea. In the first place, in the mid-2000s and until 2009, the multilateral process of the Dialogue of the Six took place. Those talks led to deals and even the dismantling of some North Korean facilities, but largely fizzled out as Kim Jong Il's health worsened and his succession worries increased. In 2009, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the global nuclear watchdog agency tasked with enforcing the verification and monitoring provisions of the NPT, left North Korea for the last time and has not returned since. In December 2011, a new young leader, Kim Jong Un, took over from his father. Under Kim Jong Un, there would be no serious diplomatic efforts until 2018, when the historic summit between Kim and US President Donald Trump took place in Singapore. This was not a non-proliferation expert and he didn't seem to care too much if Kim gave up his weapons. That summit was, rather, a way to defuse the tensions of the 2017 crisis and for the president, a former reality star, to get a brief rebound in audience among the American public. The baseless Trump-Kim diplomacy collapsed at a second summit in February 2019, when the US refused to offer North Korea sanctions relief in exchange for anything short of complete capitulation and disarmament. something that the North Koreans, like any self-respecting weapons power, could not accept.
This grim history has left us with little to show for thirty years of efforts to roll back North Korea's nuclear program. Currently, such a program runs without limits, and the only obstacle to the pace and scale of the country's nuclear development is its international isolation under economic sanctions. During the covid pandemic, North Korea has isolated itself from the world, worried about the devastating effect the pandemic would have on its limited health infrastructure. In so doing, she has sanctioned herself more strongly than the outside world could hope for. Still, that hasn't done much to slow the pace of its nuclear and missile development. In 2021, Kim Jong Un spoke at the 8th congress of the Labor Party, which governs the country, and outlined a comprehensive program to modernize its nuclear forces. Among other capabilities, Kim called for multi-warhead-capable ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, long-range cruise missiles and tactical nuclear weapons. Those statements dismantled the illusions that still sustain much of the international policy towards North Korea: it is no longer a problem of proliferation, but a problem of deterrence. In relation to the disarmament of North Korea, it is possible to speak in the same terms as in relation to the disarmament of the other eight possessors of nuclear weapons in the world.
In the year since the remarks at the 8th Labor Party Congress, Kim has shown that his ambitions are credible. He has overseen tests of new hypersonic weapons and has unveiled a new cruise missile. The Biden administration has largely failed to make North Korea a priority. Faced with a difficult international environment, the US administration has found itself (understandably) putting out fires in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan. In Asia, he continues to keep an eye on China. All of this is good news for Kim Jong Un. Although the pandemic and the economic difficulties caused by it in the country present Kim with the most problematic internal context since he came to power, the international context is perhaps the most propitious that he has ever had. An isolated Russia under Putin is unlikely to show much interest in pressuring North Korea, and China's envoy for Korean Peninsula affairs has advocated bringing "legitimate security concerns" into international politics. from Pyongyang. Both Moscow and Beijing have also called for sanctions relief against North Korea; in 2017, before relations with the US seriously deteriorated, both countries allowed the imposition of new sanctions when North Korea conducted its major weapons tests.
Diplomacy with North Korea doesn't look like it will resume anytime soon. Kim's current military modernization drive will have to run its course (as will the pandemic) before the North Koreans feel they have enough leverage to return to the negotiating table. Meanwhile, nuclear risks on the Korean peninsula remain high. In dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea, focus must be on managing the problem, deterring aggression, and reducing risks. The disarmament of Pyongyang, while a desirable goal, is no longer realistic in the short term. What we are left with is coexistence with a nuclear-armed North Korea: a dangerous coexistence, to be sure. It is time to accept the reality that thirty years of efforts to denuclearize the Korean peninsula have reached an impasse.
Ankit Panda is Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC and the author of Kim Jong Un and the bomb: Survival and deterrence in North Korea.
