Bring US nukes back to South Korea to counter Kim Jong Un’s deadly game

It may be absurd to apply the Panglossian view — the unwavering optimism propounded by Professor Pangloss in Voltaire’s “Candide,” that “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” — to the real-world dystopia that is North Korea, which one defector has described as the closest thing to “hell on Earth.”

But the credo of teleology in Pangloss — that events happen by design and are the ultimate and best manifestation of their intrinsic purpose (telos) — is key to assessing the North Korean dictatorship’s pathologies; namely, an unremitting commitment to expanding its nuclear power and abusing its population. In trying to assess why Kim Jong Un, like his predecessors, is so committed to these deadly crafts, observers must ask, “To what end?” and overcome their lingering obsession with “What made them do it?”

Seeing North Korea’s actions through a teleological lens (“What’s their purpose?”) casts Kim’s growing nuclear arsenal and the growing frequency of his nuclear threats in a far more comprehensible light than through the etiological monocle (“What caused the actions?”) propounded by his dutiful officials: blame the U.S. for North Korea’s bellicose actions and all its miserable deficiencies as a nation state.

The preponderance of the etiological approach assumes that Kim has little to no agency. Pyongyang’s propaganda is falsehood wrapped in what the Russians call “maskirovka,” that feeds off this tendency. But it’s not an enigma. Both pursuits serve to advance and, one day, fulfill the North Korean leader’s raison d’etre, his telos: the incorporation of South Korea under his rule.

Hence, strengthening his lethality vis-à-vis South Korea, the immeasurably more prosperous and pleasant Korean state of the two, and its sole treaty ally, the United States, is a non-negotiable proposition. It is not a mere “reactive measure” against “U.S. hostile policy,” which North Korea over-broadly defines as anything from raising concerns about its egregious human rights violations to the U.S. stationing troops in South Korea. Rather, it is a purposeful, proactive and all-important means to a sacred end.

Kim’s strategy has made strides lately. 

First, the regime’s disproportionate investment in weapons of mass destruction and not food supply keeps its lowest-class population in the dark and a constant state of malaise, thus rendering them all the more dependent on the regime.  

Blaming U.S. sanctions for more than 40 percent of the population’s chronic undernourishment — a man-made and -sustained state of collective misery — provides the regime an artificial cover under which to carry on as it has. Unsurprisingly, the North’s mendacious scapegoating draws sympathizers of various stripes.

Most of all, in 2022, Kim made a quantum leap in positioning himself to compel Washington to withdraw troops from South Korea by becoming a clear, present and constant nuclear threat to the U.S. mainland. By normalizing threats of preemptive nuclear attack while overseeing dozens of ballistic missile tests, Kim has fashioned the “right to nuke first” as his right.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens nuclear attack on Ukraine, world leaders take heed. But when Kim threatens a nuclear strike on South Korea and the United States, they tend to shrug it off, even though he completed this month a 15-day field guidance of his nation’s tactical nuclear operation units, during which he oversaw seven nuclear-capable missile launches.

How should Seoul and Washington respond to North Korea’s growing threat of nuclear attack? Repeat and reaffirm the U.S. extended nuclear deterrence commitment to South Korea, as Presidents Biden and Yoon Suk-yeol did in their meeting in May? Would the North Korean tyrant be sufficiently deterred by the verbal pledge when there have not been any U.S. nuclear weapons deployed in South Korea for 31 years?

Compared with the NATO Nuclear Sharing Arrangements, under which the U.S. continues to deploy some 100 nuclear weapons in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey, wouldn’t the U.S. pledge to go to war on behalf of and together with South Korea sound a bit hollow?

The U.S. deployed tactical nukes in South Korea, at times several hundreds, from 1958 to 1991, in violation of Paragraph 13 (d) of the 1953 Korean War Armistice Agreement. The clause banned “the introduction into Korea of reinforcing combat aircraft, armored vehicles, weapons, and ammunition,” except for the purpose of replacing those which are “destroyed, damaged, worn out, or used up during the period of the armistice … on the basis piece-for-piece of the same effectiveness and the same type.”

While both North Korea and China had violated the same clause earlier, by stationing several hundred MiGs in North Korea, the U.S. actions may be viewed as “an escalation” and certainly may have spurred North Korea’s pursuit of the bomb. At the same time, while the U.S. nuclear posture did not deter North Korea from launching hundreds of small-scale, deadly attacks on the South, it did deter the North from starting another war.

Are these dynamics of credible U.S. nuclear deterrence in place in Korea today? In the past, the U.S. and South Korea had nukes on South Korean soil; the North had none. Today, there are no nukes in South Korea and the North has several dozen bombs. With his new “law on policy of nuclear forces,” which set the conditions under which North Korea would use nuclear weapons first, Kim is trying to instill in his adversaries his right to use nukes whenever he deems it necessary.  

Pangloss muses to his student, Candide, “Pigs were made to be eaten — therefore, we eat pork all the year round.” Likewise, for Pyongyang, “nukes” may have been “made to be made stronger — therefore, we build bigger bombs all the year around.” The teleology in the former is Voltaire’s lampooning of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz’s optimism; the latter is a sober assessment of Kim Jong Un’s actions and intentions.

Seoul and Washington must beware: Kim is on a march toward creating “the worst in the worst of all possible worlds,” from routinizing nuclear threats and conventional limited attacks on the South as a fact of life, to becoming a credible nuclear threat to Washington itself and its security interests in South Korea, Japan and Australia, and to effecting a hostile takeover of the South through limited nuclear war. His mission is to incorporate South Korean territory under his own despotic rule and enslave the South Koreans.

The U.S. has options. It can cut its losses and, through arms control talks with Pyongyang, sign a peace treaty and abandon South Korea the way it did South Vietnam in 1973. It can also turn a blind eye if South Korea, nearing abandonment, opts to cross the nuclear Rubicon. The worst of the worst may be to believe it is ready to fight a nuclear war, only to change its mind at the last minute as North Korea prepares to nuke a major U.S. city.

Of these options, bringing tactical nukes back to South Korea is for the best in the worst of all possible alternative worlds.

Sung-Yoon Lee is Kim Koo-Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies and assistant professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and faculty associate at the U.S.-Japan Program, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Follow him on Twitter @SungYoonLee1.