A Rational Kim Jong Il?
By Jesse Taylor asks a very important question:
All dark humor aside…does it strike anyone else that North Korea’s “nuclear deterrent” (read: weapons) are a very, very, very bad thing for that nation to have?
The question could have two answers. If Jesse means “Is this bad for us”, then the answer is most certainly yes. It restrains US freedom of action, and adds, however minutely, to the chance that terrorists will acquire nukes. That said, the North Koreans have actually been remarkably conservative in foreign policy since the 1950s (that is, they’ve never come south, even when the US was tied up in Vietnam, in Gulf War I, and in Gulf War II), and no state goes through the process of developing nukes just to give them to terrorists. So, bad, but it could be a lot worse. Nothing to go and build a missile defense about.
The more interesting question is this: Is going nuclear bad for North Korea? This one I’m not sure about. Nukes buy a country like NK one thing; immunity from US attack. If it’s reasonable to think that the United States might attack North Korea (and it probably does seem reasonable to Kim Jong-Il and his inner circle), then nukes are great. The downside is that building nukes SHOULD bring you unwanted attention from the United States. Now, the Bush administration has done its best to studiously ignore North Korea for the last three years, so this problem hasn’t developed yet. In the future, however, it might. The United States has typically been content to allow small communist regimes like Cuba and North Korea to slowly crumble on their own. Acquiring a nuclear arsenal means that the US will pay attention to you, assuming a competent administration, and not in a good way.
That said, if I were advising KJ, I’d probably tell him to go ahead and build the nukes. But it’s a close thing.