Sleepwalking With the Bomb (16 page)

For the foreseeable future the successor regime will remain a dictatorship, likely a brutal and dangerous one. The possibility that such a change instead could prove beneficial hinges on whether the new regime eventually surrenders its nuclear program in exchange for better political and economic relations with the West. There is no present indication that such a shift is in the cards.

There is one long-shot possibility from outside: the Chinese can easily topple the regime. China supplies about 90 percent of the North’s energy needs. An energy cutoff would sink the state within months. But China has at least two reasons not to proceed this way.

First, China only lightly polices its 843-mile border with North Korea. The fall of Stalin’s Frankenstein’s monster would leave starving millions fleeing northward across the porous border, entering provinces where the ethnic makeup differs from that in the rest of China, and thus where the risk of increased unrest after a refugee influx is real. The country that built the world’s longest and most famous wall (the Great Wall is 4,200 miles, five times longer than its Korean border) could build a security fence, but so far China has not done so.

Second, China benefits from the North being a major thorn in the Western-Asian alliance. North Korea ties up South Korea’s military forces, along with some 28,500 American troops. The threat of a war between the two Koreas gives Western planners nightmares, especially with American military strength stretched thin around the globe. A major insurgency in Afghanistan is still winding down, and the United States has only just departed Iraq. Troops brought home will need extensive recuperation and rebuilding before being deployable again.

But these problems are only minor in comparison with the problems a preemptive strike would face. North Korea’s conventional military arsenal is in itself a major threat to the South, but its nuclear component confers substantial immunity from preemptive attack. Nor is a nuclear preemptive option against the North feasible. Targeting artillery along the 38th parallel would require ground-burst strikes, throwing up countless tons of intensely radioactive debris—simply unthinkable in light of the close proximity of Seoul’s 10 million people, who would be hostage to wind direction at zero hour. In addition, as Eisenhower noted, the political impact of a second nuclear use by a predominantly Caucasian country upon an Asian people would be seismic.

Also at issue would be the huge political impact of breaking a “nuclear taboo” that has existed since the end of World War II. Allied powers in the West have long stressed the “firebreak” between conventional and nuclear use, a concept that makes the decision to use nuclear weapons one far more than a mere continuance of gradual war escalation. The Soviet Union showed no signs of recognizing this firebreak; nor should we assume that emerging powers would. But the United States should not be the nation to disregard it.

According to Herman Kahn, the RAND corporation genius who could both joke and think clearly about “the unthinkable,” to break the taboo against using nuclear weapons would be to court unpredictable, potentially horrific dangers. The value of the taboo, Kahn explained in his 1965 book,
On Escalation,
is that, “once war has started no other line of demarcation is at once so clear, so sanctified by convention, so ratified by emotion, so low on the scale of violence, and—perhaps most important of all—so easily defined and understood as the line between not using and using nuclear weapons.”

He held that breaching the taboo, especially more than once, would be to weaken it forever:

[T]wo or three uses of nuclear weapons would certainly weaken the nuclear threshold, at least to a degree where it would no longer be a strong barrier to additional uses of nuclear weapons in intense or vital disputes. There would ensue a gradual or precipitate erosion of the current belief … that the use of nuclear weapons is exceptional or immoral. The feared uncontrolled escalation would be rather more likely to occur at the second, third or later use of nuclear weapons than as a consequence of first use.

He reminded his readers of the situation in which the world has always found itself. He feared that once broken the nuclear taboo might never be restorable:

[I]n a world in which there is no legislature to set new rules, and the only method of changing rules is through a complex and unreliable systems-bargaining process, each side should—other things being equal—be anxious to preserve whatever thresholds there are. This is a counsel of prudence, but a serious one: it is not often possible to restore traditions, customs or conventions that have been shattered. Once they are gone, or weakened, the world may be “permanently” worse off.

Thus, because of the danger to Seoul, two atom bombs dropped on Japan, and the nuclear taboo, the Western powers arrayed against North Korea cannot contemplate nuclear first use—absent absolutely certain intelligence that a nuclear strike from North Korea is imminent. After the WMD intelligence fiasco in Iraq—CIA director George Tenet famously told Congress in 2002 that the continued presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a “slam dunk”—the standard of proof to convince skeptics has become absolute certitude.

W
HAT
C
HINA
fears above all is a reunified Korea allied with the West, sitting on its border. Reunification, the stated goal of South Korean policy, envisions a democratic state living in peace alongside its neighbors. But a prosperous, democratic, unified Korea clearly would incite more unrest in China among those chafing under the rule of aging autocrats.

Even if the most beneficial kind of regime change—reunification—were to come to pass, the problems would be monumental. Combining an advanced industrial society with a stupefyingly backward, desperately poor garrison state run like a concentration camp for more than six decades is a far more difficult task than reunifying West and East Germany—which was still a difficult task, although the latter was not nearly as backward or poor as North Korea.

Thus South Korea itself, as well as China, should fear reunification. The 1990 reuniting of West and East Germany added to West Germany’s 61.4 million nearly 17 million people—all of them a generation behind the West Germans in economic development. The 1990 per capita GDP of West Germany was $24,485; the 1990 East German figure was $10,430, making the Western population two and one-third times more productive per year. By 2008, after nearly 2 trillion dollars spent in re-unification costs, the combined figure for Germany stood at $35,400, but East Germans continued to lag far behind their Western countrymen. Reuniting the North’s 24 million with the South’s 49 million people is a 50 percent population add-on for the South (versus 29 percent for West Germany). South Korea’s 2010 per capita GDP was $30,200, nearly
17 times
North Korea’s 2009 figure of $1,800. The difference is
seven times
bigger than the gap West Germany faced in absorbing the East.

Moreover, while East Germans were not schooled in entrepreneurial ways, they knew some semblance of economic life. North Korea has virtually no civilian sector at all. Its people have no real idea how to function in a modern economy like that of South Korea. Sadly, the Cold War jest about Russian factory workers wondering why, if they work in a baby carriage factory, all they can assemble are machine guns likely describes much of the North Korean economy.

Finally there is massive malnutrition in the North. The estimates of people dying of starvation during Kim Jong-Il’s 17-year rule run over 2 million. The surviving population’s physical growth is stunted. The public health and economic implications are simply staggering. For the South, the ancient Chinese admonition about being careful what you wish for may prove all too applicable if the South absorbs the primitive Hermit Kingdom.

Only reunification can end the North Korean nuclear threat. Such would prove a security boon to South Korea and the U.S. as principal nuclear guarantor of the South. But reunification might bankrupt the South. At minimum, the economic strain would be severe, with ultimate success by no means guaranteed.

That the Hermit Kingdom has endured for more than sixty years, despite serial aggressive behavior, mass starvation of its people, and development of a rogue nuclear weapon capability, attests anew to the validity of the Fourth Lesson of nuclear-age history: N
UCLEAR WEAPONS GIVE NATIONS A “DYING STING” CAPABILITY THAT VIRTUALLY PRECLUDES PREEMPTIVE ACTION AND CONFERS NEAR-TOTAL SURVIVAL INSURANCE.

__________________

20.
On June 8, 1959, the submarine
USS Barbero
fired a cruise missile carrying 3,000 letters in the direction of Mayport, Florida. The missile landed safely and the mail was delivered. The postmaster general, Arthur Summerfield, offered this prediction: “Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India or to Australia by guided missiles.” Summerfield’s prediction came partly true: mail is hauled overnight worldwide, but by cargo plane.

21.
Established in 1947, the National Security Council is an advisory body that is part of the White House staff. The NSC advises the president and coordinates foreign and defense policy matters within the White House.

22.
The Natural Resources Council Database (accessed August 21, 2011) estimates that the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons was 369 in 1950 and 640 in 1951. These are year-end totals. Only a small fraction of stockpiled weapons was actually deployed and thus ready for use.
In his centennial history of AT&T,
Telephone
, historian John Brooks writes that production of nuclear weapons went into high gear in 1951, after the desperate government had turned to the Bell System for its managerial expertise. Bell Laboratories took over management of the Sandia facility on November 1, 1949, at which time atomic bomb production was minimal. Russia’s first A-test supplied urgency. From one new design in 1948, two in 1949, and three in 1951, production increased to many designs starting in 1952. A key factor in speeding up bomb design production was the new availability of computing power.

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

—Q
UOTATIONS FROM
C
HAIRMAN
M
AO
Z
EDONG, A.K.A.
T
HE
L
ITTLE
R
ED
B
OOK
(1966)

C
HINA’S DRIVE TO REGAIN ITS ERSTWHILE POSITION AS A PREEMINENT
world power is but a generation old. Its effort to regain what it regards as its rightful place begins with supremacy in the western Pacific region. It is this intensely felt national ambition that makes ultimate confrontation between China and the United States, currently the world’s preeminent Pacific power, increasingly likely, though strategic accommodation remains a distinct possibility.

Such a confrontation could come as early as the end of this decade. And if it occurs, it could lead—even without either the U.S. or China desiring it—to a regional conflict, possibly involving the use of nuclear weapons. China is not a revolutionary power like Iran, with ambitions to remake the world order. Nor is it a rogue power like North Korea, utterly indifferent to world concerns. It is, as is Russia, a rival: it desires to supplant the U.S. as the most influential world power, starting in Asia, then projecting influence globally. It does not, like Iran, wish to destroy America; China’s fortunes are inextricably linked with ours in many ways.

But because China’s drive for ascendancy carries risk of a confrontation with the U.S., miscalculation during a crisis could lead to a war neither side desires. What emerges clearly in considering the U.S.-China relationship is the Fifth Lesson of nuclear-age history: T
HE NUCLEAR BALANCE MATTERS IF ANY PARTY TO A CONFLICT THINKS IT MATTERS, AND THUS ALTERS ITS BEHAVIOR
.

T
O SEE
the roots of such a regional conflict one must begin with Chinese history, and the Chinese interpretation of it, which emphasized the harmful impact of its intercourse with the U.S. and other Western powers over the choices made by its own dictatorial rulers.

From the early nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, the European powers heaped serial humiliations upon China. The Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century led to Britain’s thuggish imposition of the degrading, enervating opium trade on the Chinese. The colonial powers pushed around the decaying Manchu Dynasty rulers at will. The crowning episode of this dolorous history was the Boxer Rebellion. Starting in 1898, the “Society of Fists of Righteous Harmony”—“Boxers” armed with guns, martial arts, and ecstatic spirit-possession—aimed to eject foreign powers and secure China’s release from imperial domination and exploitation. Allied with the Manchu empress Cixi, they laid siege to the foreign embassies in Beijing for 55 days in 1900. The Eight-Nation Alliance of Japan, Russia, Britain, France, America, Germany, Austria, and Italy crushed the uprising, offering the Manchu Dynasty a settlement in 1901 in which the Chinese paid heavy indemnities to the foreign powers, particularly Russia and Germany.