Daily Times

A recent New York Times headline reads “new Cuban missile crisis on the Korean peninsula.” This is nonsense. There may be a crisis. It may be nuclear. But it is as far removed from the (in) famous “thirteen days in October” as Earth is from Pluto.

Clearly, Kim Jung Un’s attempts to miniaturise a nuclear warhead and fit it atop an intercontinental range ballistic missile capable of striking America is a top North Korean priority, and is a real threat. But unless China, Russia or another nuclear power are stationing their weapons in North Korea, the analogy with Cuba is plain wrong.

More accurate analogies of the situation can be with the days following Soviet Union’s testing of a nuclear weapon in 1949 and Communist China’s in 1964. In those days, the same charges about irrationality and instability were leveled at Joseph Stalin, a wartime ally of the US, and Mao Zedong, with whom the US had fought a war in Korea from 1950-53.

In 1949 and 1964, serious people had proposed pre-emptive attacks to rid the enemy states of any and all nuclear capacity. What many did not know was that in 1949, our nuclear inventory was modest at best. In 1964, despite our Triad of land-based missiles and bombers and Polaris submarines, pre-emption against China was seen as dangerously escalatory especially since the Soviet Union was increasing its nuclear capabilities and Washington planners believed a war against China would engage the Soviet Union. However, the US was wrong about this non-existent alliance. It was not wrong about not launching a pre-emptive attack, though.

Instead, US leaders believed that the threat of thermonuclear war provided sufficient deterrence against an attack or war with their then adversaries. By the mid to late 1960s, nuclear theology was expressed in Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s arbitrary definition of “assured destruction.” If the US could destroy about half of the Soviet Union’s industry and kill about a third of its population that was sufficient destruction to deter. Similar arguments were used with China.

Today, North Korea seems determined to achieve the capacity to strike the US with a nuclear weapon delivered by intercontinental missile. The fear is that the boy leader of North Korea is irrational, unstable, unpredictable and, therefore, very dangerous. Hence, given nuclear weapons, Kim is liable to use them. This reasoning could not be more mistaken. Kim’s overriding and existential priority is regime survival. Were Kim to start a war, he knows that North Korea would be destroyed and the chances that he would become hors d’ combat were almost unitary.

When President John Kennedy had asked his Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 about the probability of a pre-emptive strike destroying or neutralising all of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, the response was not 100 percent. Even if the US were to employ nuclear weapons to eliminate Kim’s capability, 100 percent effectiveness could not be guaranteed. And, Kim does not need a missile to deliver a nuclear warhead to America. While Federal Express might not be the appropriate carrier, surely a benign looking merchant ship will be.

As Senator John McCain somberly observes, North Korea has tens of thousands of artillery and missile systems well within range of Seoul some 30 miles away. These systems could deliver within several tens of minutes the conventional equivalent of a Nagasaki sized A-Bomb on the millions of residents in Seoul as well as U.S. military bases. Not even nuclear strikes on these hardened positions would eliminate this capacity.

Then there is the little matter of the million-man North Korean army. In a conventional war, that army would be demolished. But the cost would be many thousands of casualties. And it is not clear that the US would employ nuclear weapons against this ground force — although it could.

Hence, any war would destroy much of the Korean peninsula; drive potentially millions of North Koreans across the Yalu into China; and conceivably end with a nuclear strike on the US homeland through some clandestine means possibly weeks or months after the war has ended.

It is clear that, for good or ill reasons, diplomacy and incentives to delay or prevent North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons have not succeeded. Given the huge costs of another war, however, diplomacy should not be dismissed as a first step. A high level delegation, perhaps with Chinese participation, should be convened to meet with North Korean senior officials but with sensitivity and secrecy.

Negotiations with the north have been painful. Yet, in exchange for guarantees that the US will not pre-emptively strike and will respond only if North Korea moves aggressively against the south or its neighbours, North Korea will both limit its nuclear programs and allow inspections to the end from an appropriate organisation such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Sanctions could be eased.

No certainty exists that such a meeting would be convened or if it will produce successful negotiations. Nor is there certainty that the North would honour any agreement. If sanctions were lifted, Pyongyang could still cheat using the economic advantages to develop further capability. In that case, the threat of annihilation of the north remains the key to deterrence.

For those who are skeptical or hostile to such a proposal, it worked during the Cold War with a far more powerful Soviet Union and Communist China. That does not mean success can be repeated. However, the alternative of a war on the peninsula that could escalate far beyond and involve nuclear weapons does not seem a more attractive choice.

The writer is UPI’s Arnaud de Borchgrave Distinguished Columnist, a Senior Advisor at Washington D.C.’s Atlantic Council and chairman of two private companies. His next book due out this year is Anatomy of Failure: Why America Loses Wars It Starts that argues failure to know and to understand the circumstances in which force is used guarantees failure. The writer can be reached on Twitter @harlankullman