Everybody agrees that it’s bad that North Korea is a nuclear state. It’s “unacceptable” as the president put it (although the world has already basically accepted it). But rarely considered is why North Korea went nuclear.
North Korea has “eaten dirt” for more than two decades, partially because of its ruinous economic policies, but also because it has diverted so much of the scant wealth it does have into its military and its weapons programs. That shows just how important the missile and nuclear programs are to the regime—it has pursued them indefatigably despite the massive costs it has incurred as a result.
There are two primary reasons that the North has been hell bent on going nuclear. One is simple deterrence: It’s a lot less likely that North Korea will be invaded now that it’s a nuclear state—a lesson that Saddam Hussein learned the hard way. The regime made the strategic decision decades ago that the only way it could avoid forcible regime change was to pursue a nuclear deterrent. So far, that’s looked like the right bet.
But there’s another, more expansive underlying goal behind the nuclear program: to reunite the two Koreas.
Non-Koreans are often only vaguely aware of what a bizarre historical anomaly the North-South split really is. Indeed, it’s unprecedented in thousands of years of Korean history. But because the Korean War concluded decades ago, the split has become almost natural seeming to many outsiders. The most profound evidence that it’s not is the families that still remain cleaved in half by the DMZ.
Seoul takes reunification seriously (though support has declined among younger South Koreans, who have no memory of a united peninsula and who sensibly fear the vast cost they would incur should reunification occur). In the South Korean capital, I’ve visited the expansive Reunification Ministry, a vast bureaucracy which plans, day in, day out, for the eventual reunification of the Koreas.
But North Korea takes reunification seriously as well. As the Korea scholar B.R. Myers has noted, the North’s propaganda apparatus has, since Kim Jong-un’s accession, increasingly talked up “final victory”—the reunification of the Korean peninsula under Kim’s ghastly rule.
That might seem like a fanciful goal, and it is—so long as the United States and South Korea remain in an iron-clad military alliance. As such, North Korea needs to drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea. Troublingly, that’s happening. South Korea’s foolishly dovish president is at loggerheads with the Trump administration over a number of issues. A rupture in the alliance, culminating in the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea, could hand Kim the opportunity to threaten the South into submission. It’s troubling, as well, that Trump has frequently complained about the financial cost of the U.S. presence in Korea.
A realistic appraisal of why North Korea is nuclear leads to two prescriptions: Covert operations and sanctions to bring down the Kim regime, and a reified commitment to the U.S.-South Korean military alliance (perhaps with the redeployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea, as conservative politicians there are calling for). By contrast, a preemptive strike on North Korea, based on the faulty assumption that it plans to attack the U.S. mainland unprovoked, would be disastrous, as it would probably not actually denuclearize the regime (the program is vast and hidden) and kill hundreds of thousands of Koreans and Americans in the process.
