Read Sue Mi Terry on how the Kims got the bomb—and why they won’t give it up.
This past week, during his first visit to Pyongyang since 2000, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a mutual defense pact with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The agreement signaled a new stage in the countries’ growing military cooperation and their alliance against the West, and, potentially, in North Korea’s advancing nuclear program. In Foreign Affairs’ summer reading selection this week, Sue Mi Terry tells the story of how North Korea got the bomb—and why it won’t give it up. North Korea’s possession of a nuclear weapon—let alone one capable of striking North America—was not inevitable, wrote Terry, who spent years as an analyst on Korean issues in the CIA, in August 2021. But “years of inconsistent, and at times counterproductive, U.S. efforts to contain the North Korean nuclear threat have only let it fester.” North Korea launched its first nuclear test in 2006; in the years since, amid Washington’s dithering, it has amassed dozens of nuclear warheads and enough fissile material to build more every year. “If the United States ever had an opportunity to turn back the clock on North Korea’s nuclear program—and it is far from clear that it ever did—that moment has passed.” North Korea’s nuclear aspirations date back to the inception of the pariah state in the 1950s, Terry wrote. For the country’s leaders, the weapons are “a military asset, an insurance policy, and a vast source of prestige all in one.” The Kim family, “which has ruled the country without interruption since 1948, does not want to go the way of Saddam Hussein of Iraq or Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya—tyrants who gave up their weapons of mass destruction programs only to be overthrown and killed.” The United States may have had a window of opportunity to permanently undo Pyongyang’s nuclear progress in 1994, when U.S. President Bill Clinton “seriously contemplated military action.” But that option, Terry acknowledged, “was fraught with uncertainty and would have exacted an unacceptable human toll,” and Clinton abandoned it in favor of a negotiated deal that froze Pyongyang’s program—an agreement that ultimately fell apart. Since then, the United States and its partners have been trapped in a “hopeless dynamic” that whipsaws between halfhearted pressure and futile engagement. Ultimately, “the North Korean nuclear crisis is a reflection of North Korea’s government,” Terry wrote. “Until that regime either dramatically reforms itself or collapses, the nuclear threat will remain.”
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