Regrets—we’ve all had a few. L’esprit de l’escalier—that wonderful line coming to mind a moment too late—is a common annoyance after failed dates and dud job interviews; dented fenders and bum shoulders attest to avoidable failures of depth perception and misjudged forays into backyard football games.
When it comes to the development of nuclear weapons by rogue states, however, regrets become rather more profound.
Consider the apparently intractable problem of North Korea’s weapons program. Pyongyang began surreptitiously developing nuclear weapons in the 1980s, and by the early 1990s, the totalitarian state had announced its intention to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a bold statement of its desire to go nuclear. Come 1994, North Korea planned to extract enough raw material from its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon to create five or six nuclear weapons.
President Bill Clinton strongly considered launching a preemptive strike on Yongbyon—the defense journalist Jamie McIntyre reports that the administration had drawn up an attack plan consisting of cruise missiles and F-117 fighter jets. Clinton’s—correct—calculus was that it would be unacceptable to allow a sociopathic dictatorship to arm itself with nukes, especially one with no regard for human rights, a history of threatening (and invading) its neighbors, and a penchant for unpredictability.
And then he blinked. With a little “help” from Jimmy Carter, who took a trip to North Korea to meet Kim Il-sung, Clinton by October 1994 had struck the “Agreed Framework” between the two countries. Bill Clinton, we suspect, has more regrets in his life than most, but this one should be atop the list: The Agreed Framework allowed the North Koreans to, in McIntyre’s words, “cloak their covert nuclear program until they could build a working bomb.” Now, North Korea has upwards of 20 nuclear weapons, with more on the way. The regime is making strides in its missile program, with the goal of launching intercontinental ballistic missiles—capable of hitting the United States and carrying nuclear weapons—tantalizingly close.
In other words, a preemptive strike in 1994 may have been the right thing to do, neutralizing North Korea’s nuclear program before it became the global menace that it is today.
Preemptive strikes have certainly been effective before. In 1981, Israeli forces struck the Osirak nuclear facility near Baghdad, which was reportedly less than a month away from being operational. Saddam’s nuclear program never recovered. In September 2007, the Israelis took a similar action against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, destroying a suspected nuclear facility of his. Likewise, Syria has never gone nuclear. And indeed, even the much-maligned invasion of Iraq has this going for it: It was better to have taken out Saddam before he (or perhaps even worse, his horrific sons) was in possession of full-fledged weapons of mass destruction. Otherwise the world might have had another North Korea on its hands today.
The problem is, the benefits of preemption are all too often invisible. In the run-up to the year 2000, for example, companies spent millions of dollars to fix the Y2K problem—the so-called Millennium Bug that would have crippled many computer systems. When the New Year rolled around, and the world proceeded as normal, people guffawed: The Y2K bug had been overhyped! That corporations spending millions to upgrade their systems might have helped went unremarked. Likewise, travelers often grouse about having to take their off their footwear at airports, noting that there hasn’t been a shoe bombing since Richard Reid’s failed attempt at bringing down a flight between Paris and Miami in 2001. But isn’t it possible that it is precisely because of the new airport security regulations that such an attempt has not been made?
The Trump administration has been hinting in recent months and weeks that it is considering striking North Korea—”all options are on the table” is the mantra. This would be a risky move, considering the North’s close proximity to Japan and especially the ease with which it could strike its archenemy South Korea. South Korea’s splendid capital Seoul, home to more than 20 million people, is precariously close to the DMZ. And indeed, while the North Koreans don’t yet have nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, it is widely understood that they possess short- and medium-range missiles capable of launching nuclear attacks on South Korea and Japan. It’s also not clear how efficacious a strike would be: North Korea’s weapons materials are dispersed widely throughout the country, with some components buried deep underground and others even underwater.
But the nuclear point is the most salient one: It is precisely because North Korea is now a nuclear power that dealing with it has become so difficult. Preemption works. “Post-emption” is a lot harder.
