North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is advancing quickly. This year, it has tested a suite of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles that can hit neighbors and American bases in East Asia, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, two intercontinental-range ballistic missiles and a purported thermonuclear weapon capable of flattening a city. Soon Kim Jong Un will be able to deliver it to our shores, if he cannot do so already.
This, we are told, is an unfortunate but not an existential problem. Although it will reshape geopolitics, there is no real threat of nuclear warfare, because Kim has no death wish. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says Americans should sleep well at night, and analysts argue that it would be tantamount to national suicide for Kim to use nuclear weapons against the United States. If his purpose is to ensure his survival (how better to understand his quest for nukes?), why would he risk it by starting a conflict with Washington he can’t win? Surely it won’t come to war, let alone nuclear war.
Yes, Kim is brutally rational. And that is precisely why he may have to use nuclear weapons, but not in a first strike against American cities. Kim’s nuclear arsenal exists to stop his enemies’ quest for regime change. If North Korea and the United States wind up shooting at each other, it might make sense for Kim to use nuclear weapons first in a way that increases his chances of survival. The basic idea is to use one set of nuclear devices to stave off the conventional invasion, and hold in reserve longer range, more powerful devices that threaten the enemy’s cities to deter nuclear annihilation. It’s a doctrine called “asymmetric escalation,” employed by states that are conventionally weak. France articulated it during the Cold War to deter the more powerful Soviet Union, and Pakistan does the same today against a more powerful India.
The strategy turns on Kim’s main calculation that the United States will say it’s not worth losing a major American city to get rid of him. This would allow him to avoid the fate of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi, who did not have nuclear weapons. Deterrence worked uneasily during the Cold War — albeit with close calls and some hair-raising moments — but it worked. Many of the same principles about mutual destruction still obtain today between major powers.
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