The ‘Hermit Kingdom’s’ claim to have mastered the science of nuclear warhead should be taken with a pinch of salt. But there isn’t room for complacency
Early this month, North Korea claimed to have launched a ballistic missile from a submerged submarine. It was recently announced that it can now make nuclear warheads small enough to fit on a missile. If both those claims are true, then it can now deliver a nuclear weapon on the US, at least in theory. But there is always some doubt about North Korean claims.
While a defence official in Pyongyang said that the country's nuclear programme had “long been in the full-fledged stage of miniaturisation”, some Western defence experts think the North Koreans have not really mastered the art yet. But General Curtis M Scaparrotti, the senior US military commander in South Korea, thinks otherwise.
“I believe (the North Koreans) have the capability to have miniaturised the device at this point, and they have the technology to potentially actually deliver what they say they have”, Gen Scaparrotti said last October. But to be sure that the miniaturised weapon actually works on a ballistic missile, North Korea would have to test-fire it to see if it survives the heat and vibration of re-entering the atmosphere in working order. It has not yet done that.
Others think that the footage of the submarine launch may have been faked. The missile emerges from the sea, sure enough, with the Maximum leader looking proudly on, but Kim Jong-un was obviously photo-shopped in, and in one shot there seems to be a barge floating on the surface near the missile's exit point. However, let us assume for a moment that both claims are true — because they will be sooner or later.
What does North Korea intend to do with its nuclear weaponsIJ And why is it trying so urgently to persuade its enemies that they are ready to use nowIJ The rational and conventional answer to the first question is that Pyongyang's nukes are solely intended to deter the United States from using nuclear weapons on North Korea. The United States has long-standing military alliances with both South Korea and Japan, and it has never said that it would abstain from using nuclear weapons if there were a war between North Korea and its neighbours.
In this rational world, having enough nuclear weapons to deter the United States from going nuclear would give North Korea a major advantage in the event of a ground war in the Korean peninsula. Its army is much bigger than the South Korean and US ground forces facing it. How many North Korean nuclear weapons would be enough to deter the United States from using its own nukes, in this contextIJ A dozen would probably do it, and professor Siegfried Hecker of Stanford University, a former director of the los Alamos National laboratory, thinks that North Korea probably now has that many, “half likely fuelled by plutonium and half by highly enriched uranium”.
But rationality has not been the outstanding feature of politics in North Korea recently. In the past three years Supreme leader Kim Jong-un has purged most of the men who worked closely with his father, Kim Jong-il, and many have been executed. Whole families have been murdered, including some with links by blood or marriage to Mr Kim's own. So we cannot just assume that North Korea's nukes are purely defensive, or that its leader, after 28 years of living in a guilded cage and three and a half years of absolute power, has been adequately instructed in the theories of nuclear deterrence that have become orthodox in older nuclear-weapons states. Nor is anybody in the North Korean military hierarchy going to try to instruct him now, if he is ignorant in such matters.