Us kids of the Cold War are getting pretty long in the tooth nowadays, but most of us still have vivid memories of the threat of nuclear war.
We remember newspaper stories with graphics projecting miles-wide rings of destruction from nuclear weapons, we remember the "duck and cover" drills at school that had us ducking under our desks, putting our heads between our legs, and kissing our butts goodbye. We didn't know how futile all that would have been in the event of the real thing, but, I suppose, it made people feel better.
Nuclear war was a worry back then, but so was nuclear proliferation. The more countries that had nukes, the riskier the whole thing was deemed to be, as our concerns weren't limited to just the Soviet Union and China. The geopolitical situation has changed a lot back then. Rogue states like North Korea have the bomb. So is nuclear proliferation always a bad thing? Maybe not. This article is from 2016, but the questions it raises may be more relevant now than ever.
Nonproliferation zealots are making sure nuclear weapons now proliferate only to totalitarian states. Despite much rhetoric and sincere, well-intentioned efforts, the United States sat by as North Korea developed its nuclear weapons. It is not too late to disabuse China and North Korea of the idea that nuclear proliferation pays. Japan ought to begin a sincere program to build deliverable nuclear weapons to show China that China’s support to North Korea is counterproductive and strategically naive. The Republic of Korea ought to begin a nuclear-weapons development program.
This won’t appeal to the “no nukes” brigades, and it sure won’t blow up a lot of skirts in Beijing, either; Chairman Xi is sure to object to South Korea and Japan having hot rocks to toss around. But Japan could become a nuclear power if they wished it, cultural attitudes towards nuclear weapons are (understandably) not leaning towards approval, but a bunch of nuclear tipped-missile in the hands of Kim Jong Un may change those attitudes some. In Europe, Russia has threatened the use of tactical nukes in Ukraine; we may be closer to the specter of nuclear war than we have been in decades.
Since China would greatly oppose Japan becoming a nuclear-weapons state, should Japan declare its intention to start a nuclear-weapons program in response to these repeated, unjustified and deeply threatening provocations by the Pyongyang regime, China might finally realize that it is in its interest to facilitate the collapse of the totalitarian regime in Pyongyang and allow the Seoul government to absorb the North. The United States could reassure China that U.S. forces are in Korea only to defend the South Koreans. And Japan could assure China that its program is entirely defensive and would likely be suspended, should the North Korean regime collapse and the peninsula become completely denuclearized. A Japanese nuclear-weapons program would be entirely within Japan’s constitutional rights, given the North Korean nuclear-weapons program.
There’s a truism among Second Amendment advocates that states “the only defense against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Can we extrapolate that to “the only defense against a bad country with a nuke is a good country with a nuke"? If rogue nations like Iran and North Korea are armed with nukes, should we encourage allies like Japan, South Korea, and (supposedly) to arm themselves with the only deterrent to nuclear arms – that is, their own nuclear arms?
In the case of North Korea, that may be effective. Even the stunted little gargoyle with bad hair from a long line of stunted little gargoyles with bad hair that rules North Korea would be hesitant to vanish in a puff of nuclear flame and is probably savvy enough to know that would be the likely outcome of a nuclear strike on their part. But the Iranians? The theocracy in charge of Iran adheres to an apocalyptic death cult; they may well welcome a nuclear exchange. Our primary “ally” in the region, the Saudis, are not ideologically aligned with the West. They are allies of convenience, not commitment, like the Soviet Union in World War 2. The one thing that may hold the Iranians back is the likelihood of a constant whittling away of their nuclear projects by Israeli air strikes, but then, Iran can always buy nukes from North Korea, who would be likely willing to sell the mullahs a few crowd-pleasers. North Korea, we should note, has been building and testing missiles, too.
See Related:
Russia May or May Not Have Launched a Non-Nuclear ICBM at Ukraine
It’s been said that diplomacy is “the art of saying ‘nice doggy, nice doggy’ while looking for a rock.” That’s pretty much the state of diplomacy, such as it is, in the Middle East, and with North Korea, for that matter, and has been since the Romans tried to negotiate with Thracian bandits and Teuton raiders.
The article concludes:
The Chinese government must conclude that North Korea is far more of a strategic danger to China than a unified and strategically neutral Korea under the governance of Seoul. A Japanese and South Korean nuclear-weapons program would bring a geostrategic situation clearly less favorable to China. At present, politicians in the West are too timid to recommend such a step, and cling to shallow arguments that the world should be rid of nuclear weapons—so that only rogue states will have them.
And it’s important to note that those rogue states will develop nukes no matter what the United States does, no matter what our allies do; in the case of the Norks, who already have nukes, nukes in the hands of the Japanese and the South Koreans may well give them pause. I doubt that would work on the Iranians.
It’s a thorny topic, and where nukes are concerned, there really aren’t any good answers. Nuclear weapons aren't something to take likely, although, for all the worry about rogue nations flipping hot rocks around, the idea of biological warfare is what really ought to terrify people; speaking as a biologist, I can tell you that bug warfare scares me more than all the other kinds combined. After all, a nuke goes off, there's a flash, a shock wave, and everything gets set on fire, but once that's over, that's the worst of it. A bug, though...
This seems appropriate.
