Crashing the nuclear club
NO ONE can advocate living with North Korea as a nuclear power, but it may well become a grim necessity. The United States should work with its friends and allies to use every diplomatic option to roll back North Korea's nuclear and missile efforts. It should use incentives when these offer hope and sanctions and disincentives when they do not. It should use all of its influence with China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea.
The United States should not abandon military options. At a minimum, North Korea should never believe it can continue to proliferate without the risk of US strikes. The same threat acts as major incentive for China, Russia, and South Korea to press North Korea to halt its efforts, and ``good cop, bad cop" options almost inevitably work better in the real world than acting as if every issue could be solved by treating a real threat as a ``rational actor."
Like Iran, however, it is all too easy for the United States to ``speak stickly and carry a big soft." North Korea has had year s in which to plan for US conventional preemption. Aside from its reactors and any other major enrichment facilities known to the US intelligence community, the rest of its nuclear weapons program is easy to disperse and hide. Bombing cannot destroy fissile material, and it is easy to locate and collect even after a successful strike. North Korea probably is far more advanced in centrifuge, cascade, and heavy water reactor design than Iran, and it can probably create a dispersed, hidden new enrichment effort in a matter of years -- if it has not already begun one.
North Korea's major missile production facilities are vulnerable, but it already has large numbers of dispersed surface-to-surface missiles, and some have probably been armed with chemical warheads for more than a quarter of a century. North Korea can also use conventional weapons and artillery to attack Seoul and South Korea's economic centers. It already has thousands of sheltered weapons near the DMZ to do this. It may well be willing to act even if this means repeated US follow-up strikes and damage to its military assets. North Korea has, after all, built up its military machine through decades of hardship for its people and at the cost of watching its economy deteriorate. It once was a far more powerful economy than South Korea. Today, it has a GDP of $40 billion and a per capita income of $1,700; South Korea now has a GDP of well over $800 billion and a per capita income of $21,000.
The end result is that the United States, like the nations of Northeast Asia, may have to live with the ``worst case" -- a steadily more dangerous nuclear North Korea at the core of one of the most critical economic centers in the world. It may be a decade before North Korea can pose a major nuclear-armed ICBM threat to the United States, if ever. It could be only a few years before it poses a nuclear-armed missile threat to Japan, South Korea, and the flow of trade out of China -- which is a vital threat to the US economy and every job in America.
This does not mean that the United States should give up on preventive or preemptive options. At a minimum, the United States needs damage-limiting options and to pose a constant threat. As long as North Korea has its present kind of leadership, it should never be sure, never be able to predict that proliferation is safe.
The United States does, however, need to do more. It needs to seek the kind of sanctions that can be real and enduring, focusing on North Korea arms trade and technology transfer. It needs to keep the incentives openly on the table and never sink into bluster and a refusal to listen.
At the same time, the United States needs to take more lasting action. It needs to work with South Korea and Japan to build up their precision conventional strike capability and missile and air defenses to act as a major deterrent and improve their war-fighting capabilities. It should structure its own stealth and conventional precision strike capabilities to offer a new form of ``extended deterrence" that could cripple the North Korean military and industrial base without inflicting massive civilian casualties. It should make it clear that there a major economic penalties for any nation or firm that trades or invests in North Korea in any form as long as North Korea proliferates. The United States faces a far more real and serious vital national interest than it ever did in Iraq, and it must act accordingly.
Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. 
