History Forum / General / British History / October 2006

Once again, Charles Krauthammer hits the nail squarely on the head.

DSH
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What Will Stop North Korea

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 13, 2006

It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched
from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the
Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response
upon the Soviet Union .

-- President John F. Kennedy,

Oct. 22, 1962

Now that's deterrence.

Kennedy was pledging that if any nuke was launched from Cuba, the United
States would not even bother with Cuba but would go directly to the source
and bring the apocalypse to Russia with a massive nuclear attack.

The remarkable thing about this kind of threat is that in 1962 it was very
credible.  Indeed, its credibility kept the peace throughout a half-century
of the Cold War.

Deterrence is what you do when there is no way to disarm your enemy. You
cannot deprive him of his weapons, but you can keep him from using them. We
long ago reached that stage with North Korea.

Everyone has tried to figure out how to disarm North Korea.  It will not
happen.  Kim Jong Il is not going to give up his nukes.  The only way to
disarm the regime is to destroy it.  China could do that with sanctions but
will not.  The United States could do that with a second Korean War but will
not either.

Bingo! -- DSH

So we are back to deterrence.  Hence the familiar echoes of the Cuban
missile crisis with North Korea's rude entry into the nuclear club this
week. The United States had to immediately put down markers for deterrence.
President Bush put down two.

Correct. -- DSH

One marker, preventing a direct attack on our allies in the region, was
straightforward, if bland: "I reaffirmed to our allies in the region,
including South Korea and Japan," the president said in a nationally
televised statement, "that the United States will meet the full range of our
deterrent and security commitments."  It is understood by all that the
decades-old American nuclear umbrella in the Pacific Rim commits us to
attacking North Korea -- presumably with in-kind nuclear retaliation -- were
it to attack our allies first.

Gruesome stuff, but run-of-the-mill in the nuclear age.  The hard part is
the second marker Bush tried to put down: proliferation deterrence.

We are in an era far more complicated than Kennedy's because his great
crisis occurred before the age of terrorism.

Bingo! -- DSH

The world of 1962 was still technologically and ideologically primitive:
Miniaturized nuclear weaponry had not yet been invented, nor had modern
international terrorism.  Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation
Organization gave the world that gift half a decade later with their
perfection of the political airline hijacking.

Terrorism has since grown in popularity, ambition and menace. Its
practitioners are in the market for nuclear weapons.  North Korea has little
else to sell.

Correct!  And its People starve. -- DSH

Hence Bush's attempt to codify a second form of deterrence: "The transfer of
nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities
would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold
North Korea fully accountable for the consequences of such action."

Indeed! -- DSH

A good first draft, but it could use some Kennedyesque clarity.  The phrase
"fully accountable" does not exactly instill fear, as it has been used
promiscuously by several administrations in warnings to both terrorists and
rogue states -- after which we did absolutely nothing. A better formulation
would be the following:

"Given the fact that there is no other nuclear power so recklessly in
violation of its nuclear obligations, it shall be the policy of this nation
to regard any detonation of a nuclear explosive on the United States or its
allies as an attack by North Korea on the United States requiring a full
retaliatory response upon North Korea."

That's a Good Second Draft. -- DSH

This is how you keep Kim Jong Il from proliferating.  Make him understand
that his survival would be hostage to the actions of whatever terrorist
group he sold his weapons to.  Any terrorist detonation would be assumed to
have his address on it.  The United States would then return postage.
Automaticity of this kind concentrates the mind.

And Kim Jong Il does indeed need to have his mind concentrated.  -- DSH

This policy has a hitch, however.  It works only in a world where there is
but a single rogue nuclear state.  Once that club expands to two, the policy
evaporates, because a nuclear terror attack would no longer have a single
automatic return address.

Which is another reason why keeping Iran from going nuclear is so important.
With North Korea there is no going back.  But Iran is not there yet. One
rogue country is tolerable because it can be held accountable.  Two rogue
countries guarantees undeterrable and therefore inevitable nuclear
terrorism.
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If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gets nuclear weapons and continues to talk and act as
irresponsibly as does Kim Jong Il we should promise to return postage to
BOTH North Korea and Iran.  TWO automatic return addresses. --  DSH

DSH

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