No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security

4. Small States and Nuclear War

C h a p t e r 4 Small States and Nuclear War I just don’t think nuclear weapons are usable . . . I’m not saying that we militarily disarm. I’m saying that I have nuclear weapons, and you’re North Korea and you have a nuclear weapon. You can use yours. I can’t use mine. What am I going to use it on? What are nuclear weapons good for? Busting cities. What President of the United States is going to take out Pyongyang? —General Charles Horner, U.S. Air Force, 1994 I have no sympathy for the man who demands an eye for an eye in a nuclear attack. —George Kennan, 1976 ‘‘Sacred War’’ In October 2006, North Korea successfully tested a nuclear bomb. Nearly four years later, as the United States and South Korea mounted a major joint military exercise in July 2010 that included the massive American aircraft carrier George Washington, North Korea thundered that such an ‘‘unpardonable’’ provocation would mean war. The North Korean regime is a bizarre, pseudo-Communist dynasty governed by the fanatically oppressive Kim family since World War II, and it routinely makes such threats against actions it finds offensive or insulting—which is almost everything. This time, however, Pyongyang brandished a new addition to its military and rhetorical arsenal. ‘‘The army and people,’’ the official North Korean news agency declared, ‘‘will legitimately counter with their powerful nuclear 128 Chapter 4 deterrence the largest ever nuclear war exercises to be staged by the U.S. and the South Korean puppet forces.’’ The North’s National Defense Council also promised a ‘‘retaliatory sacred war’’ in response to the maneuvers.1 Less than two years later, in late 2012, North Korea finally succeeded in launching a crude, three-stage ICBM prototype, placing a small satellite in orbit and proving not only that Pyongyang now had a bomb, but that the regime was on the way to achieving an intercontinental delivery capability as well.2 ‘‘We are not disguising the fact,’’ North Korean defense authorities said in early 2013, ‘‘that the various satellites and long-range rockets that we will fire and the high-level nuclear test we will carry out are targeted at the United States.’’3 The post-Cold War problem of rogue state nuclear proliferation is no longer hypothetical. These small powers, whom Clinton administration national security advisor Anthony Lake in 1994 termed ‘‘outlaw’’ or ‘‘backlash ’’ states, not only remain ‘‘outside the family of nations,’’ in Lake’s words, but also ‘‘assault its basic values.’’4 North Korea’s nuclear tests and rash threats represent more than the entry of a new member into the nuclear club. Nuclear weapons are now in the hands of a small, unpredictable state whose foreign policy remains centered on hostility to the United States, whose arsenal is not dedicated to a specific opponent (as in the cases, for example, of India and Pakistan), whose regime remains in a state of declared hostilities with a U.S. ally, and whose leaders remain outside of any constraining alliance system. The North Korean regime has joined the nuclear game with no pretense to being a status-quo power, and no superpower competition to restrict its ambitions. The North Korean challenge raises issues that go far beyond Pyongyang and Washington. Other states that are no friend to the liberal international order, particularly the terror-supporting theocracy in Iran, are seeking nuclear arms as well. While a minimum deterrent can keep the peace among the great powers such as Russia, China, and the United States, how can small states, crowded by innocent neighbors and commanding only comparatively tiny arsenals, be deterred? The sheer disparity and imbalance of power between the actors involved, and the location of the possible hostilities , complicates the question of what to do if deterrence fails. What threats can actually be executed without unacceptable geopolitical—and moral— consequences? U.S. policymakers have unwisely avoided making difficult choices about these questions for two decades. They have relied instead on intentional ambiguity while pursuing nuclear policies better suited to the Cold War than to the twenty-first century. Small States and Nuclear War 129 Now, however, the threat is no longer notional, and ambiguity will no longer suffice. The United States and its allies need to create a new and radically different deterrent against small nuclear powers. Before constructing that new deterrent, it...