For the foreseeable future the successor regime will remain a dictatorship, likely a brutal and dangerous one. The possibility that such a change instead could prove beneficial hinges on whether the new regime eventually surrenders its nuclear program in exchange for better political and economic relations with the West. There is no present indication that such a shift is in the cards.
There is one long-shot possibility from outside: the Chinese can easily topple the regime. China supplies about 90 percent of the North’s energy needs. An energy cutoff would sink the state within months. But China has at least two reasons not to proceed this way.
First, China only lightly polices its 843-mile border with North Korea. The fall of Stalin’s Frankenstein’s monster would leave starving millions fleeing northward across the porous border, entering provinces where the ethnic makeup differs from that in the rest of China, and thus where the risk of increased unrest after a refugee influx is real. The country that built the world’s longest and most famous wall (the Great Wall is 4,200 miles, five times longer than its Korean border) could build a security fence, but so far China has not done so.
Second, China benefits from the North being a major thorn in the Western-Asian alliance. North Korea ties up South Korea’s military forces, along with some 28,500 American troops. The threat of a war between the two Koreas gives Western planners nightmares, especially with American military strength stretched thin around the globe. A major insurgency in Afghanistan is still winding down, and the United States has only just departed Iraq. Troops brought home will need extensive recuperation and rebuilding before being deployable again.
But these problems are only minor in comparison with the problems a preemptive strike would face. North Korea’s conventional military arsenal is in itself a major threat to the South, but its nuclear component confers substantial immunity from preemptive attack. Nor is a nuclear preemptive option against the North feasible. Targeting artillery along the 38th parallel would require ground-burst strikes, throwing up countless tons of intensely radioactive debris—simply unthinkable in light of the close proximity of Seoul’s 10 million people, who would be hostage to wind direction at zero hour. In addition, as Eisenhower noted, the political impact of a second nuclear use by a predominantly Caucasian country upon an Asian people would be seismic.
Also at issue would be the huge political impact of breaking a “nuclear taboo” that has existed since the end of World War II. Allied powers in the West have long stressed the “firebreak” between conventional and nuclear use, a concept that makes the decision to use nuclear weapons one far more than a mere continuance of gradual war escalation. The Soviet Union showed no signs of recognizing this firebreak; nor should we assume that emerging powers would. But the United States should not be the nation to disregard it.
According to Herman Kahn, the RAND corporation genius who could both joke and think clearly about “the unthinkable,” to break the taboo against using nuclear weapons would be to court unpredictable, potentially horrific dangers. The value of the taboo, Kahn explained in his 1965 book, On Escalation, is that, “once war has started no other line of demarcation is at once so clear, so sanctified by convention, so ratified by emotion, so low on the scale of violence, and—perhaps most important of all—so easily defined and understood as the line between not using and using nuclear weapons.”
He held that breaching the taboo, especially more than once, would be to weaken it forever:
[T]wo or three uses of nuclear weapons would certainly weaken the nuclear threshold, at least to a degree where it would no longer be a strong barrier to additional uses of nuclear weapons in intense or vital disputes. There would ensue a gradual or precipitate erosion of the current belief… that the use of nuclear weapons is exceptional or immoral. The feared uncontrolled escalation would be rather more likely to occur at the second, third or later use of nuclear weapons than as a consequence of first use.
He reminded his readers of the situation in which the world has always found itself. He feared that once broken the nuclear taboo might never be restorable:
[I]n a world in which there is no legislature to set new rules, and the only method of changing rules is through a complex and unreliable systems-bargaining process, each side should—other things being equal—be anxious to preserve whatever thresholds there are. This is a counsel of prudence, but a serious one: it is not often possible to restore traditions, customs or conventions that have been shattered. Once they are gone, or weakened, the world may be “permanently” worse off.
Thus, because of the danger to Seoul, two atom bombs dropped on Japan, and the nuclear taboo, the Western powers arrayed against North Korea cannot contemplate nuclear first use—absent absolutely certain intelligence that a nuclear strike from North Korea is imminent. After the WMD intelligence fiasco in Iraq—CIA director George Tenet famously told Congress in 2002 that the continued presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a “slam dunk”—the standard of proof to convince skeptics has become absolute certitude.
Tomorrow’s Korea: The Double-Edged Sword of Reunification
WHAT CHINA fears above all is a reunified Korea allied with the West, sitting on its border. Reunification, the stated goal of South Korean policy, envisions a democratic state living in peace alongside its neighbors. But a prosperous, democratic, unified Korea clearly would incite more unrest in China among those chafing under the rule of aging autocrats.
Even if the most beneficial kind of regime change—reunification—were to come to pass, the problems would be monumental. Combining an advanced industrial society with a stupefyingly backward, desperately poor garrison state run like a concentration camp for more than six decades is a far more difficult task than reunifying West and East Germany—which was still a difficult task, although the latter was not nearly as backward or poor as North Korea.
Thus South Korea itself, as well as China, should fear reunification. The 1990 reuniting of West and East Germany added to West Germany’s 61.4 million nearly 17 million people—all of them a generation behind the West Germans in economic development. The 1990 per capita GDP of West Germany was $24,485; the 1990 East German figure was $10,430, making the Western population two and one-third times more productive per year. By 2008, after nearly 2 trillion dollars spent in re-unification costs, the combined figure for Germany stood at $35,400, but East Germans continued to lag far behind their Western countrymen. Reuniting the North’s 24 million with the South’s 49 million people is a 50 percent population add-on for the South (versus 29 percent for West Germany). South Korea’s 2010 per capita GDP was $30,200, nearly 17 times North Korea’s 2009 figure of $1,800. The difference is seven times bigger than the gap West Germany faced in absorbing the East.