Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
It wouldn’t be an altruistic giveaway to Pyongyang; it would help the United States and its Northeast Asian allies improve their own security.
At a time when North Korea shows little interest in engagement, both Seoul and Washington can and should take unilateral measures to mitigate the risk of inadvertently prompting nuclear escalation. This would not be altruism but rather in self-interest to reduce the risks of unnecessary inadvertent escalation.
Quantitatively, the North Korean arsenal of deployed nuclear delivery systems and warheads remains smaller than that of any other nuclear state. Qualitatively, matters are a bit more nuanced.
There's also a simple geographic reality that given North Korea's geographic position on the globe and their ambitions to develop long-range missiles, at some point they have to fly over another country's territory.
North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile over Japan, believed to be the farthest its ever launched one before. It prompted people to take shelter, and heightened concerns over escalating aggression in the region.
Denuclearization is now in the dustbin of history as a failed policy. There is simply no practical plan at this point, especially in the short term, to bring North Korea to the negotiating table.
North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly has adopted a new law on nuclear policy, updating a 2013 antecedent. While the law does not fundamentally upend North Korean nuclear strategy or doctrine, it expands the scenarios under which the country’s nuclear weapons may be released.
The development and eventual deployment of tactical nuclear weapons by North Korea will represent the most serious negative development for peace and security on the Korean Peninsula since the country’s development of intercontinental-range ballistic missiles capable of ranging the United States.
Paul Haenle will sit down with Anja Manuel to examine ongoing challenges to the global rules-based order. This discussion is the second of Carnegie China's 2022 Distinguished Speakers Series and will also be recorded and published as a China in the World podcast.
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