North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (right) reacting after the test-fire of a Hwasong-14 ICBM/STR/AFP. As Americans mark Thanksgiving this year...
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| North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (right) reacting after the test-fire of a Hwasong-14 ICBM/STR/AFP. |
Called the Hwasong (or “Mars”) 15, the missile showed that North Korea is capable of striking any part of the continental U.S.—from Los Angeles to New York—with a thermonuclear weapon.
The North Korean regime celebrates the test date as a “revolution,” among the third...As Americans mark Thanksgiving this year amid the pandemic, North Korea will be recalling a special anniversary of its own. On Nov. 28, 2017, dictator Kim Jong Un oversaw the launch of the largest missile ever flight-tested by the world’s last Stalinist country. Called the Hwasong (or “Mars”) 15, the missile showed that North Korea is capable of striking any part of the continental U.S.—from Los Angeles to New York—with a thermonuclear weapon.
The North Korean regime celebrates the test date as a “revolution,” among the third Kim’s greatest accomplishments. The launch was even commemorated with a monument, featuring a poem devoted to “the eternal and immortal achievement that has borne great power.”
Today Mr. Kim faces a range of problems, including severe economic sanctions, a spate of natural disasters and the pandemic, but his hold on power was made far more secure on that night in 2017 when he was able to declare that his impoverished country’s nuclear deterrent was now “complete.” That deterrent rests on both “hardware”—its bombs and delivery vehicles—and “software”—its systems for nuclear command, control and communications, known to arms experts as NC3.
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| Hwasong-14 (KN-20) / Center for Strategic and International Studies. |
Nuclear command, control and communications systems are the sinews of any country’s nuclear forces. They encompass the organizations, procedures and technical safety measures incorporated into a nuclear force. On New Year’s Day in 2018, Mr. Kim pointedly alluded to this, reminding Washington that not only was the entire U.S. mainland “within the range of our nuclear strike” but that “the nuclear button is on my office desk all the time.”
Mr. Kim was trying to make his nuclear deterrent credible by underscoring the real possibility of using atomic weapons. After all, a nuclear delivery capability alone cannot serve as a deterrent unless your foes believe it will always be available for use. North Korea’s considerations in setting up its NC3 are much more complicated than ensuring that its leader has access to the proverbial button.
Mr. Kim, like other leaders with nuclear arsenals, must navigate what experts call the “always-never” dilemma: Any NC3 system must be nimble enough that nuclear weapons are always working and can be used when needed, but must also have robust enough checks and balances that the bombs are never used without proper authorization or detonated by accident.
This dilemma has never been truly resolved and causes persistent anxiety. The most experienced nuclear states—notably the U.S. and Russia—have labyrinthine command-and-control systems, while newer nuclear powers such as India, Pakistan and now North Korea have struggled to get the “always-never” balance right.
In declaring itself a nuclear-weapons state in 2013, North Korea also announced how it would ensure that its nuclear weapons weren’t used without authorization.
Nuclear-launch authority would rest only with the supreme leader “to repel invasion or attack from a hostile nuclear weapons state and make retaliatory strikes.” Just like in the U.S., where only the president can order a nuclear launch, only Mr. Kim can give the order for the peacetime use of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
“Command-and-control provisions may change in a crisis—which is where things get scary.”
But command-and-control provisions may change in a crisis—which is where things get scary. North Korea has long feared a U.S. attempt to “decapitate” its regime with an attack out of the blue to kill Mr. Kim. If Mr. Kim is the sole known legitimate source of a nuclear order in North Korea, taking him out early in a crisis might ensure that no nuclear weapons were used.
As such, if the U.S. started to move ships and bombers to Asia for the possible start of a war, Mr. Kim might quietly expand the scope of nuclear-launch authority to military commanders in the field, whether or not he communicated this publicly. That way, even if a U.S. attack separated Mr. Kim from his “button” or killed him outright, his nuclear weapons could still be launched. With such planning, Mr. Kim might hope that the U.S. would be deterred from invading North Korea.
We have no evidence that Mr. Kim has taken this step (known to nuclear experts as “pre-delegation”), but the logic of nuclear deterrence would make it a rational move. Even if he were eliminated, his nuclear forces could still “fail deadly”: That is, with or without Mr. Kim, any strike on North Korea would result in nuclear retaliation.
Since the U.S. couldn’t rule out the possibility of losing several American cities in such a strike, the logic goes, Washington would have to forgo any decapitation option. (The U.S. adopted pre-delegation early in the Cold War to further deter the Soviet Union from a possible nuclear first strike.)
But inside North Korea’s monolithic authoritarian regime, using pre-delegation in a crisis would raise some very uncomfortable questions. For one, the personnel and officers of the Korean People’s Army Strategic Force—the physical stewards of North Korea’s missiles—are selected for (among other factors) their ideological fealty to Mr. Kim’s supreme leadership.
That could mean that these men would be primed in a crisis to interpret innocuous phenomena—say, a civilian South Korean airliner that strayed off-course—as something more ominous, like a nuclear-armed U.S. bomber. North Korea’s unsophisticated radar has led it to see stealth aircraft from South Korea and the U.S. as a major threat, leaving little margin for error. North Korean field commanders could well err on the side of defending the “outstanding leader of the party, army and people” by treating any perceived provocation as a serious threat.
Preventing an inadvertent nuclear disaster on the Korean Peninsula will depend not only on Mr. Kim upgrading his nuclear software but on the U.S. better understanding the choices and circumstances that have driven North Korea’s nuclear posture. The burdens of nuclear deterrence have long weighed on Washington’s relationships with Moscow and Beijing, and they will now do so with Pyongyang too.