By Van Jackson
The status quo on the Korean Peninsula is inching the US-ROK alliance closer to a crisis.
U.S. and South Korean policy toward North Korea is stuck in a rut. Current alliance policy, dubbed “strategic patience” on the U.S. side, amounts to a time-buying strategy. But during this time, North Korea is making strides in its nuclear and missile programs, while alliance defenses struggle to keep pace. The alliance posture toward North Korea seeks to buy more time, but time is on North Korea’s side; the status quo on the Korean Peninsula inches the alliance closer to a crisis.
There are many aspects of North Korea that get endlessly debated — how many nuclear weapons it has, when its next nuclear test will be, whether Kim Jong-un is firmly in control — but there are also areas of relative consensus. There’s widespread agreement that North Korea has a nuclear detonation capability today; three prior nuclear tests have proved that. Its inventory of nuclear devices is growing. The explosive yields of its nuclear detonations are increasing with each test. It’s making investments in diversified nuclear delivery vehicles (fixed facilities, the road-mobile KN-08, SLBMs). Its nuclear weapons capability is probably geographically dispersed. And as its nuclear program moves in this direction, its missile program is improving in range and accuracy. These are not necessarily all objective facts, but they are all points on which most Korea watchers agree.
These trends are a problem. If they continue uninterrupted, whether in five or 20 years, there’s going to be a great convergence — a point at which North Korea has nuclear armed missiles in the dozens, located in multiple parts of their country, and capable of firing from multiple types of weapons systems. There’s still no consensus about how North Korea sees its own nuclear arsenal, but at the point of great convergence, North Korea will have the ability to engage in nuclear warfighting; a prospect that think tanks like the Rand Corporation (PDF) have considered but that the United States has no experience actually doing. If the United States was reluctant to commit “boots on the ground” to combat ISIS, it seems even less likely that it would be willing to hazard the risks of engaging in direct combat with a nuclear-armed adversary. A continuation of the status quo, then, inches us toward the unsavory options of either nuclear warfighting or restraining ourselves when faced with an adversary that possesses a nuclear arsenal.
Read the full story at The Diplomat