“This could set off very serious alarm bells in Beijing and Moscow.”
Last year, North Korea’s missile tests started having major problems: Tests of the Musudan, a medium-range missile, failed nearly nine times out of ten, surprising some experts. The country had pushed its nuclear program forward relatively quickly, and avoided some key errors. What had changed?
According to a detailed new report from The New York Times, creaky parts and bad engineering probably played a role—but those problems may have been compounded by an American campaign of cyberattacks on the missile launches, ramped up under President Obama.
Attacking another country’s military arsenal, whether by bomb or by malicious code, always comes with the potential of escalation. Targeting North Korea’s nuclear program—the pride and joy of the country’s volatile supreme leader, Kim Jong Un—is especially dicey.
For one, it could prompt North Korea to retaliate. The pariah state showed its willingness to launch cyberattacks on the U. S. when its state-sponsored hackers obtained and published private emails and information from Sony Entertainment in 2014. Leaking information from a movie studio is a far cry from a cyberattack on, say, a piece of critical infrastructure like the U. S. electrical grid—a feat the U. S. military fears North Korea may one day be capable of—but the Sony hack may have been something of a warning shot.
Attacking another country’s nuclear arsenal risks disrupting the delicate balance of deterrence that generally keeps powerful militaries from lobbing nukes at one another. The prospect of mutually assured destruction that has thus far staved off nuclear war could be thrown into jeopardy.
If a nation expects its valuable warheads to be destroyed at any moment, it could develop a “use it or lose it” mentality, said Vince Houghton, the historian and curator at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D. C. That could encourage an unpredictable leader like Kim to launch a working missile before it’s too late and it’s remotely disabled. What’s more, a country that thought it had disabled an adversary’s nuclear arsenal “might be more tempted to take the risk of launching a preemptive attack,” wrote David Sanger and William Broad in the Times.
