U.S. Primacy threatens North Korea and drives them to proliferate – that ensures conflict

North Korea is broke and has been so for a very long time. Its conventional military preparedness is qualitatively degraded. It confronts a hostile and far more powerful alliance whose combined military strength dwarfs Pyongyang’s. Even as it is facing an adversary that has continuously and explicitly identified it as a potential target for a nuclear strike, its own nuclear umbrella has been yanked away and Pyongyang stands alone. North Korea, in short, has neither the economic capacity to engage in internal balancing through conventional arms buildup nor the diplomatic means to engage in external balancing through alliance formation.38 Consequently, it should be hardly surprising, or at least not so irrational, that Pyongyang would see nuclear weapons, the great equalizer and the only weapons system that can truly level the playing field for the humble and the haughty alike, as the singular source of salvation. Any other state facing a similarly dire strategic situation would likely have found nuclear weapons equally irresistible. Indeed, it is highly doubtful that South Korea, in a counterfactual scenario where the Cold War is presumed to have been won by the Soviet Union and it is the ROK that is facing an existential crisis, would have behaved any better than its northern brother. States have sought nuclear weapons for far lesser reasons—for something as vain as international prestige and nationalist pride. By comparison, survival is all the more compelling a reason for going nuclear.39 Not only are nuclear weapons the most reassuring means to ensure North Korea’s survival, they are also the cheapest, which makes them even more appealing for a country as broke as the DPRK. The cost-effectiveness of nuclear weapons is widely known. Because the bang produced by nuclear weapons is so big, both literally for its destructiveness and figuratively for its wider strategic impact, the economic cost of nuclearization can be easily justified in terms of return on investment. Relative to the spending requirements of upgrading its decaying conventional forces, the financial cost of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and the related missile program has in fact been very low. According to one estimate, North Korea’s core spending on nuclear weapons and missile programs in 2010 and 2011 was around US$0.5 billion each.40 While half a billion dollars is a large sum of money for a desperately poor country, as a proportion of North Korea’s total military expenditures, it is not such a huge sum, falling well within a single digit range of around 6 to 8 percent in the most recent years. Another estimate, coming from sources within the ROK government, puts the total cumulative cost of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and missile programs, including its long-range ballistic missile test in March of 2012, at around US$3.1 billion (see Table 3 for details). The expenditure on the strictly nuclear side has been surprisingly small, costing Pyongyang only US$1 billion for initial development and production, and less than half a billion dollars for the first two nuclear tests.41 About US$0.8 billion was spent on the two Taepodong missile launches conducted in 2006 and 2009, and the Unha-2 launched in April 2012 is estimated to have cost Pyongyang another US$0.8 billion. The expenditure will surely go up as North Korea attempts to miniaturize its nuclear warheads and fine-tune its ballistic missiles, but overall, the financial burden borne by North Korea in its nuclear pursuit has not been excessively punishing. On the other hand, the bang produced by it is undoubtedly much bigger than anything North Korea could have accomplished by spending the equivalent sum on conventional weaponry. A US$3.1 billion investment in nuclear weapons and delivery systems has enabled the DPRK to come very close to bridging a cumulative defence spending gap of nearly US$200 billion since 1992, restoring parity to the overall military balance in the Korean peninsula, and potentially acquiring deterrence capabilities against the US. By comparison, South Korea spent almost US$3 billion, about the same amount North Korea has spent on its nuclear and missile development, on just three Aegis-equipped destroyers. While these KD-III destroyers are no doubt significant enhancements to the force level of the ROK navy, their strategic impact pales in comparison to that of North Korea’s nuclear weapons. The ultimate vindication for the DPRK’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is the very fact that the Kim regime has defied all odds and repeated predictions of an inevitable collapse to hang on to its half of the Korean peninsula on an arguably much stronger strategic footing. Of course, the debacle that is the North Korean economy continues, as does the untold suffering of North Koreans. However, in terms of its external security situation, it cannot be denied that North Korea’s strategy of pursuing internal balancing asymmetrically—that is, by going nuclear—has produced tangible and substantial results. The numerous concessions and assistance that Pyongyang managed to extract from the international community, while significant, are secondary benefits. The most obvious and important outcome is the irrefutable reality that instead of being destroyed by the US as was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or sharing East Germany’s fate of being absorbed out of existence, the DPRK continues to exist as an independent state. As Kim Jong Un recently declared in his first public speech, “Superiority in military technology is no longer monopolized by imperialists, and the era of enemies using atomic bombs to threaten and blackmail us is forever over.”42 This declaration, while exaggerated, as one would expect from the DPRK, is not mere grandstanding and bravado; there is a significant kernel of truth in Kim’s claim, in that nuclearization has in fact enhanced North Korea’s security. This is not to suggest that the DPRK is now secure. On the contrary, the incomplete weaponization of its nuclear devices and its lack of a credible long-range delivery system mean that North Korea’s deep-seated insecurity is yet to be put permanently to rest. Nonetheless, Pyongyang’s nuclear quest has achieved the singular objective sought by North Korea, its survival, at a bargain price equivalent to just three destroyers. It is in this Herculean achievement, the fact that the world is still grappling with the headache that is the DPRK two decades after the demise of the Cold War, that we can locate the method in the madness of Chairman Kim and the instrumental rationality of Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.