The Guardian view on North Korea:
apocalypse not right now
Editorial
The uneasy standoff in the Korean
peninsula cannot be resolved by a war. It will require brave and creative
diplomacy
Sunday 16 April 2017 19.26 BST Last modified on Sunday 16
April 2017 22.00 BST
The apparent failure of a North Korean missile launch on
Sunday seems to have allowed the threat of a catastrophic war to recede.
Neither President Donald Trump nor Kim Jong-un has backed down, yet neither has
been forced into delivering on his threats. This may have been the best
possible outcome of the crisis in the short term, but it was a remission, not a
cure. The underlying and apparently insoluble conflict remains and there is
little sign of the kind of clear and careful thinking on either side which will
be needed to scale it down. The North Korean regime is a ruthless tyranny with
a clear aim in view, while Mr Trump is vainglorious, sentimental and
unpredictable. Both sides have been hooting and bellowing at each other in a
manner foreign to diplomacy: a North Korean general boasted on Saturday that
his country could defeat all its enemies so that there would be nothing left
even to sign a ceasefire, while Mr Trump tweeted last week that “North Korea is
looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we
will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.” There was a time when we asked
whether the president of the USA could be trusted with his finger on the
nuclear button. Now we have to worry as well whether he can be trusted with a
mobile phone. North Korea won’t start a war because of one of his provocative
tweets, but it might well respond with a counter provocation which he felt he
could not ignore. All the choices open to him then would be bad.
This has been clear since 1994, when the Clinton
administration considered a pre-emptive war with North Korea. The CIA war-gamed
the consequences, and concluded that even a conventional war might lead to a
million deaths in South Korea after an air strike had taken out the North
Korean facilities. The arithmetic looks much worse now. The North Koreans have
nuclear weapons and may have the means to deliver them at least as far away as
Japan. Even if all of them were eliminated there remains a ferocious
conventional arsenal at the disposal of the leadership, which has not grown any
less dangerous since 1994. All of these estimates are shrouded in uncertainty,
as everything about North Korea must be, including the size and location of its
nuclear armament. We don’t even know whether they have nuclear missiles: they
have the missiles and they have the bombs, but to put them together into
reliable weapons in the face of vigorous American cyber-sabotage involves
further technical challenges which may not have been met. But even hypothetical
missiles have proved a powerful deterrent. To unleash them would ensure a
terrible retaliation, fatal for the country as well as the regime, but if it
were losing a conventional war the regime might feel it had nothing to lose and
that it might as well take down as much and as many enemies as it could. So
there is no reasonable case for the use of force against Pyongyang except as a
very last resort. Mr Trump will by now have been told very forcefully by his
own advisers as well, perhaps, as by China’s Xi Jinping, that there is no cheap
demonstration of US power available here, and perhaps no effective one either.
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