Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, is the author of “Winter’s Tale,” “A Soldier of the Great War” and the forthcoming novel “Paris in the Present Tense.”
North Korea has embarked at breakneck speed upon a slipshod effort to field land-, mobile-, and submarine-based ICBMs with nuclear warheads. Unlike the eight other nuclear powers, North Korea’s doctrine resides unknowingly and capriciously in the mind of one man.
All nuclear doctrines are different, but most never go beyond the conditional when treating their arsenals as instruments of deterrence. North Korea, however, issues an unrelenting stream of histrionic threats that comport with its recklessness in the shelling of South Korea and sinking of one of its warships, the kidnapping of Japanese citizens in Japan, assassinations abroad, executions and Stalinist gulags at home, criminal sources of revenue, proliferation of missilery, and, tellingly, its perpetual war footing.
The totality of its declarations, behavior, and accelerating nuclear trajectory cannot be ignored. Nuclear weapons alone radically change the calculus of any strategic problem. Given the complexity and fragile interdependence of the structures of American life, nuclear detonations in only a few of our cities constitute a true existential danger. North Korea’s successful August test of the KN-11 submarine-launched ballistic missile—along with its construction of a second ballistic-missile submarine and its development of longer-range land-based missiles—will put North America at risk.
Note that North Korea has no defensive need of nuclear weapons. Because of the vulnerability of South Korean population centers, it can exercise an almost equivalent deterrence with its conventional forces and huge stockpile of chemical weapons.
Over two decades the U.S. has run the extremes from President Clinton’s foolish or deceptive claim that his diplomacy had solved the North Korean nuclear problem, through the serial procrastinations of subsequent administrations, until the belated realization that if nothing else works the U.S. will have to attack North Korea full force. The first option has failed. The second, to which it is possible we may be compelled, is catastrophic.
The heart of South Korea’s economy and half its 50 million people are densely concentrated within range of the approximately 10,000 North Korean artillery pieces, rocket launchers, and short-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering chemical munitions, of which North Korea has an estimated 5,000 metric tons. Even conventional explosives would have a devastating effect. No matter how fast South Korean and American forces raced to suppress such fires, not to mention a nuclear attack itself, millions would probably die.
With such shock and escalation there is no guarantee that China or Russia would not come to North Korea’s aid. Russia could also take the opportunity to feast upon Eastern Europe if American power were monopolized by the battle, as it would be.
As undesirable are the two extremes of a North Korean nuclear strike or pre-emptive war in armament-saturated East Asia, America cannot accept the former. The U.S. will be forced to the latter if it fails to exploit the considerable ground that still lies between them.
