Kim Il Sung communicated a complementary rationale to Romanian dictator Ceaușescu in 1971, explaining North Korea’s provocations in terms of the expectation that the United States would not retaliate because it showed an unwillingness to do so in the past: “Americans don’t want to continue this fight. The Americans let us know [through their inaction] that it’s not their intention to fight the Koreans again.” Kim Il Sung judged the United States on its track record, just as he expected the United States to judge North Korea based on its track record. North Korea’s twin beliefs, in offense and adversary reputation, are the only plausible explanation for the otherwise puzzling historical pattern: why a much weaker North Korea has attacked much stronger US and South Korean adversaries hundreds of times since the 1960s. For a small power to repeatedly attack a larger power without being suicidal, it must expect that the larger power will not exploit its superior power; North Korea made that inference about the United States during the Cold War, based on the latter’s track record of restraint.

North Korea’s offensive, reputational thinking about threats and violence is not confined to the Cold War. We find the same pattern of thought and action emerging between North Korea and the United States in the 1990s, and in crises as recent as 2010. North Korea repeatedly used small-scale, limited acts of violence for political ends that were much bigger than warranted by the acts themselves, attributing outsized effects (deterrence of America) to their deliberate accumulation of friction: “it’s good for them to know that we won’t sit with folded arms,” as North Korea’s foreign minister told the Soviet ambassador. In 2002, North Korea’s lead negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, expressed the other side of this belief, telling US Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly that “If we disarm ourselves because of US pressure, then we will become like Yugoslavia or Afghanistan’s Taliban, to be beaten to death.” Showing weakness invites war all the same, but on less favorable terms than if it drew first blood.

Moreover, a rare quantitative study examining North Korea from 1997 to 2006 found that when the United States displayed more aggressive international intentions toward other adversaries, as with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, North Korean vitriolic rhetoric would surge, not diminish. In these instances, North Korea could have gone mute and largely stayed out of view while the United States focused its ire on others. Instead, it opted for a rhetorical posture of effectively warning the United States off of bringing its hawkish propensity to the Korean Peninsula. This is consistent with the prevailing North Korean view that offense is the best defense. When Evan Osnos visited Pyongyang in 2017, one of his hosts, the vice-president of the Institute for American Studies (a regime-run think tank), hinted at the oft-heard origin of such thinking: “Historically, the Korean people have suffered because of weakness. That bitter lesson is kept in our hearts.” Kim Jong Il told former President Bill Clinton much the same when the two met in 2009, a meeting I will discuss at length in the next chapter. Kim claimed his “military-first” policy, which involved going on the offensive at times, “had nothing to do with hostility,” but rather with deterrence: “The DPRK was a small country surrounded by giants. The Korean nation had suffered Japanese occupation . . . the purpose of the military-first policy was not to attack others but to prevent other countries from attacking the DPRK.” Internalized narratives about their own experience lead them to believe that even small projections of resolve help keep enemies at bay.

Over time, then, North Korea has expressed in word and deed that taking calculated risks is how it believes a smaller power survives amid threats from much larger enemies. The risks it decides to take flow from this offensive, reputational understanding about the utility of threats and the “diplomacy of violence,” to borrow a phrase from strategic studies pioneer Thomas Schelling. When North Korea’s Foreign Ministry stated on December 7, 2017 that war with the Trump administration had become an “established fact . . . The remaining question now is: when will the war break out?” they were expressing a fatalism with roots in their strategic thinking. Virtually everything of consequence that North Korea says and does draws on antecedent narratives and stock beliefs that it has nurtured over time. The way North Korean officials think about coercion in particular makes it highly unlikely that they respond to anything they perceive as unprovoked pressure with anything but pressure in kind, even if such a response triggers war. This does not mean that North Korea is “undeterrable,” or that North Korea can never be struck without leading to a war. But unprovoked attacks, attacks that make the regime’s leadership appear weak or irresolute, or attacks that appear to the regime as a prelude to a larger military campaign, will generate retaliation and escalation. To North Korea, the failure to respond to pressure with pressure will bring war just as surely as an escalating spiral of retaliation, so they have scarcely any alternative to hitting back if they are hit first. In this context, whatever additional legitimacy or economic benefits nuclear weapons may provide, nothing could be more valuable than a weapon that allows North Korea to make good on its emotional and strategic need to ensure that “I die, you die.” This theory of victory matters because it is the context within which North Korea makes decisions about nuclear weapons.

Risks of War, Nuclear and Otherwise

At the time of writing in 2018, North Korea was a de facto nuclear weapons state, and the destructive capacity and survivability of its nuclear arsenal improved every year leading up to the nuclear crisis. Between 2006 and 2017, North Korea conducted six nuclear tests, gradually increasing the yield of the blasts. North Korea claimed its sixth test, on September 3, 2017, was a hydrogen bomb, the nuclear yield (around 100 megatons) of which was several times greater than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki together in 1945. The blast yield made the claim at least plausible. Through iterations of research, development, and testing, North Korea has improved its ability to deploy ever larger destructive nuclear yields. Crucially, it also improved its ability to miniaturize nuclear devices to fit on delivery vehicles like ballistic and cruise missiles.

One would be forgiven for asking how North Korea’s nuclear weapons makes the situation on the Korean Peninsula more dangerous than the ever-present danger of decades past. Even without a nuclear arsenal, North Korea has so much long-range artillery targeting South Korea’s capital, Seoul, that it could destroy most of it in a matter of hours. It also has a large chemical weapons stockpile, and has not acknowledged any particular taboo around the use of chemical weapons. North Korean agents used a chemical weapon to assassinate Kim Jong Un’s older brother in 2017 at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. If Kim could use such weapons against his own brother, we should also expect them to be used in the event of open conflict. And North Korea’s military, despite being comprised of Soviet era equipment, is the fourth largest in the world and enjoys all the natural advantages that come with fighting in home territory. But the introduction of nuclear weapons can heighten dangers in new and sometimes counterintuitive ways. Nuclear weapons limit what adversaries wishing to avoid nuclear war can do to North Korea. They increase the upper-end costs of misperception, miscalculation, and worst-case scenarios. They grant North Korea greater optionality in pursuing non-nuclear coercive violence, making North Korean offensives more difficult to predict, defend against, and deter. And they may embolden North Korean officials to adopt more aggressive strategies in the pursuit of political goals.

Van Jackson is a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington, and the Defence and Strategy Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies. He served in the Obama administration as a policy adviser and strategist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, participating in nuclear negotiations with North Korea and formulating deterrence policies with South Korea.

Image: Reuters