Deterring North Korea

Graham Allison, of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, writes in the Washington Post of the risks of a failure of deterrence in the case of North Korea:

Deterrence emerged as a central concept in Cold War strategy. It meant convincing the adversary that the costs of taking an unacceptable action would greatly exceed any benefits it could hope to achieve. How did the United States prevent the Soviets from seizing Berlin? By convincing Soviet leaders that such an attack would trigger a response that would destroy their country.

Effective deterrence required three components: clarity, capability and credibility. Clarity meant bright lines and unacceptable consequences. Credibility was understood to be in the eye of the beholder. How credible was the threat to trade Boston for Berlin? Never 100 percent. But U.S. forces, exercises and communication were crafted to convince Soviet leaders they dare not test it.

To date the Bush administration has demonstrably failed to deter Kim Jong Il.

Allison maintains that for Kim to be deterred he "must feel in his gut the threat that if a nuclear weapon of North Korean origin explodes on American soil or that of a U.S. ally, the United States will retaliate precisely as if North Korea had attacked the United States with a nuclear-armed missile: with an overwhelming response that guarantees this will never happen again." Allison cites a sobering historical precedent:

In 1962, as the Soviet Union was emplacing nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba, some worried that these weapons could be transferred to a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro. Kennedy issued an unambiguous warning to Nikita Khrushchev. "It shall be the policy of this nation," he announced, "to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." Khrushchev knew that meant a nuclear war.

What Allison recommends is the single most important thing the free world can do about the threat from North Korea, and in particular the threat of nuclear terrorism using material of North Korean origin. There is no obvious resolution of this problem. Diplomatic approaches have failed; all that is open to us is to meet Allison's criteria for deterrence, being clear and credible in our countervailing threat of retaliation.

Allison speaks with immense authority. His byline in the newspaper states that he was assistant secretary of defence in the Clinton administration and has written a book on nuclear terrorism. He is also, however, the author of a hugely influential book on the Cuba missile crisis, Essence of Decision (1971). I can't do justice to its thesis in a short description, but the book presents different models for interpreting the crisis. These are: the Rational Actor model, in which contending governments rationally seek to maximise utility; the Organisational Process model; and the Governmental (Bureaucratic) Politics model. Each will yield different interpretations of events in the Cuba missile crisis.

Nuclear deterrence is a much less robust system under the second and third of these models. Under Model II, in which organisations follow certain set procedures rather than rationally assess the highest pay-off, "nuclear crises between machines as large as the United States and Soviet governments are inherently chancy. The information and estimates available to leaders about the situation will reflect organisational goals and routines as well as facts." Under Model III, which takes account of politics within the leadership, the way crises are managed "is obscure and terribly risky". The interaction of different constituencies within government, and the potential for misunderstanding among them, "could indeed yield nuclear war as an outcome". (Quotations are from p. 260.)

Clarity is essential to deterrence. During the Cold War, on at least two occasions the world came close to nuclear disaster. (These were the Cuba missile crisis in 1962, and the misperception of the Sovet leadership in 1983 that Nato exercises were a prelude to a nuclear first strike.) We can be still less confident that deterrence is robust when we are dealing with an irrational political agent such as Kim Jong-il (or Saddam Hussein, who launched three near-suicidal wars in 17 years and will fortunately never be in a position to start another). The assurance of isolationists on both wings of politics (see, for example, more or less any recent issue of the American Conservative magazine of Pat Buchanan) that deterrence and containment will work against a nuclear-armed North Korea or Iran, as they eventually did against the Soviet Union, is a huge assumption and nothing more.