The growing fear among Pyongyang watchers is that–talks or no talks–North Korea has already made the fundamental decision to develop a nuclear arsenal and no longer intends to treat its nuclear program as a bargaining chip to be bartered away in exchange for money and pacts. “It’s possible North Korea has crossed the Rubicon,” says Prof. Ashton Carter of Harvard University. “The regime may now believe it has to have nuclear weapons for its own security.”
If that is the endgame, then how might a nuclear North flex its muscle? One surprising model is Israel, an undeclared nuclear power since the late 1960s. Pyongyang sees advantages to Israel’s “neither confirm nor deny” posture. In its case, opacity keeps Washington guessing and allows neighbors China and Russia diplomatic leeway to defend it against censure in the United Nations–as they did last week. “You don’t have to declare that you have a bomb, but there’s very deep suspicion that you do,” says Peter Hayes of the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley, California. “North Korea studies the Israeli model very carefully.”
Pakistan may be another model. Strategically, argues Rand Corp.’s Bruce Bennett, “Pakistan is clearly thinking beyond one weapon as a final throw.” In other words, Islamabad views its nukes not as a last-ditch deterrent against a more powerful foe but as potent tactical weapons for the battlefield. North Korea, Bennett says, might act similarly should the United States attack preemptively. Rather than responding with an all-out blitz across the DMZ, “they might say: ‘Two can play at this game, we just took out the Blue House’.”
Forecasting Pyongyang’s behavior with precision, of course, has always been impossible. Experts agree that the more nukes the North comes to possess, the more likely it is to use them in any conflict. Then again, Washington’s success at regime change in Iraq may make Pyongyang’s nuclear policy more cautious. Says Korea specialist Hideshi Takesada, at the end of the day “only one person in the world knows what their [doctrine] is, and his name is Kim Jong Il.” That’s more than scary enough.
