North Korea on Friday unveiled what it says is the fifth iteration of its Pukguksong-class submarine-launched ballistic missile. Kim Jong Un hopes his display will pressure the Biden administration into early concessions.
Still, when we look beneath the surface of this performance, it becomes clear that Kim is playing a weaker hand than he presents.
The North Korean leader’s first challenge is that his submarine-launched ballistic missile capability is still in its early infancy. The North Koreans have not yet successfully tested one under battle conditions. Moreover, most weapons system analysts believe that the Pukguksong-5 is unlikely to have a range of more than 2,500 kilometers. That might sound like a lot, but it’s actually very low in comparison to the ones deployed with the U.S. and Russian navies, which have effective ranges of more than 10,000 kilometers.
Another problem for Kim is his lack of a submarine force capable of delivering the submarine-launched ballistic missiles against Guam, Hawaii, Alaska, or the U.S. West Coast. The nuclear submarine on which these missiles will be embarked isn’t exactly a gem of technological advancement. Instead, it is an adaptation of the 1950s-era Soviet Romeo-class diesel-powered submarines. It will be extremely vulnerable to detection by U.S. sonar and other sensor systems that populate the western Pacific Ocean, the Yellow Sea, and the Sea of Japan. The moment this submarine left port, it would be shadowed by U.S. nuclear attack submarines. Probably more than one. The North Koreans wouldn’t know those submarines were there unless and until they rose to their launch depth, which is shallower than that of other ballistic submarines. Then, they would be destroyed. Even a launch close to North Korea toward a U.S. military base on Okinawa would be very difficult to pull off. Top line: If the United States can detect the Russian Borei and Khabarovsk submarines, and it can, it can detect Kim’s submarine.
His soaring rhetoric aside, Kim is aware of these limitations.
The dictator might be rotund, but he is not stupid. In turn, this submarine-launched ballistic missile is ultimately designed not for war or strategic deterrence but for the same purpose as Kim’s new multiwarhead ICBM: to spark American civilian fear. Kim wants Americans to be afraid and to pressure the Biden administration into making concessions. Equally important, he wants to put Xi Jinping in a position to leverage U.S. concessions in return for Beijing’s influence on North Korea. In recent weeks, China has further relaxed its enforcement of sanctions against North Korea. Xi knows that the Biden administration will see the U.S. intelligence reporting to know what he is up to but will also hope that Biden chooses to appease Beijing in response.
The appropriate U.S. strategy to deal with Kim and Xi thus remains the familiar realist one. First, the offer of a deal that balances North Korea’s ICBM disarmament to its retention of a limited number of nuclear warheads. Next, the dangling of new trade and sanctions against Pyongyang and Beijing in support of that objective.
