Can the world live with North Korea’s bomb? by Ian Bond
North Korea will soon become the ninth country on earth with a useable nuclear weapon. It carried out its sixth nuclear test on September 3rd 2017; and in the first eight months of the year it carried out about a dozen tests of ballistic missiles (some capable of reaching the continental United States or Europe). The US, China, Russia and others have been trying to stop North Korea developing nuclear weapons since the late 1980s. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump have tried many different approaches: from bilateral talks and aid programmes to military threats and economic sanctions. They have flattered China, hoping to persuade it to put pressure on its ‘client’ in Pyongyang, and (particularly under Trump) threatened it with economic punishment for failing to do so. Nothing has worked. Russian President Vladimir Putin may have been right when he said on September 5th that the North Koreans would “rather eat grass” than give up their nuclear programme. If Washington had possessed a usable military option for taking out North Korea’s nuclear programme, it would have used it before the North had a viable nuclear device. But the cost of conflict would be immense: Seoul lies within easy range of North Korea’s large holdings of artillery and missiles. The UN Security Council has approved more sanctions on North Korea, which will make life there even harder, but its largely autarkic system makes it less vulnerable to
economic pressure than Iran was. As part of the latest package, China agreed to reduce but not cut off energy supplies: it fears the collapse of Kim Jong-Un’s regime more than his nuclear weapons, both because it might result in large-scale refugee flows into China, and because Korean unification might put US troops on China’s border. The world has no choice now but to live with a nuclear-armed North Korea while trying to prevent the situation getting worse. That means defending the non-proliferation regime; deterring conflict; and diminishing the risk of accidental nuclear war. To prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons, the permanent members of the UN Security Council must keep trying to slow the further progress of North Korea’s nuclear programme by hindering its access to technology and equipment. They must ensure that the regime continues to suffer economically and politically, and show that countries that do not seek nuclear weapons end up more prosperous and secure than those that do. They must therefore also stick to their side of the bargain that ended Iran’s nuclear programme.