Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons and missile programs have passed the point of no return. That makes Trump’s threats of preventative war a fantasy.
In recent weeks, a deluge of leaks has sprung out from the U. S. intelligence community concerning North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs. Taken together, the leaks portray Kim Jong Un’s regime as nearing mastery of a nuclear-tipped missile that could hit American soil.
Three separate and critical intelligence assessments have emerged in recent weeks that merit attention. First, the U. S. intelligence community, in consensus, now assesses that North Korea is fully capable of developing compact missile-mountable nuclear weapons. Second, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospational Intelligence Agency assess that North Korea has a fissile material stockpile sufficient for 60 bombs today and is producing additional fissile material at a rate of 12 bombs per year.
Finally, the third assessment, which I first reported last week, is that the Central Intelligence Agency assesses North Korea’s intercontinental-range ballistic missile re-entry vehicle technology to likely be sufficient for the delivery of a nuclear device to the United States—meaning it could probably survive re-entry on a normal trajectory and successful detonate that compact nuclear warhead over an American city.
The sudden breakout of leaks as President Donald Trump blusters dangerously about meeting Kim’s threats with “fire and fury” has led well-intentioned observers to see echoes of the run-up to the Iraq war. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, for instance, has suggested that these leaks are aimed at supporting military action—as bogus stories about aluminum tubes and mobile weapons labs were back in 2002.
This is precisely the wrong conclusion.
Instead of paving the path to war, the public release of these intelligence assessments—two of which remain without known consensus within the intelligence community—are likely aimed at injecting caution into the debate over what to do about North Korea. They should cause Americans to understand the value of establishing a stable deterrent relationship with North Korea as we enter an era where its ICBMs are perhaps months from seeing operational deployment. In other words: The time to start a war with North Korea is not after various parts of the U. S. intelligence community assess that it could likely lob a nuclear weapon at U. S. cities today. The window is gone— certainly for a preventative war. Pre-emptive war also raises the uneasy prospect of betting that the United States would be able to detect and destroy all of North Korea’s road-mobile ICBMs, not leaving even a single launcher capable of retaliating with a devastating nuclear strike.
Making the case for a preventative war with North Korea would today defy reality. Kim already has the capability that any such strikes would seek to deny. And it is not clear that a preventative war in the general sense—the notion that, if war is inevitable, it is better for the United States to fight today, not tomorrow—is at all better for the United States, whose relative power will continue to far outstrip North Korea’s. While hawkish officials in the U. S. and South Korea alike may continue to shift the goalposts on prevention by noting that North Korea may not have “completely gained” capabilities like re-entry vehicles —and therefore there’s still time to strike—betting that North Korea can’ t hit a U. S. city in a moment of existential crisis doesn’ t seem like a bet worth making.
Kim’s fancy new missiles
In July 2017, for the first time, North Korea launched a ballistic missile capable of reaching the continental United States. The Hwasong-14, an ICBM known as the KN20 by the U. S. intelligence community, flew not once, but twice last month. In both tests, North Korea satisfactorily demonstrated that its new two-stage, liquid-fueled ICBM could comfortably surpass the 5,500 kilometer range requirement that the United States and the Soviet Union once agreed would serve as the threshold for an “intercontinental” range missile.
