The Diplomat:
While there can be no certainty about how North Korea views its nuclear arsenal and how it might be employed, I have growing doubts about many contemporary arguments advanced by North Korea and nuclear experts. The collective conventional wisdom seems to point to a peacetime nuclear first-use strategy (dubbed “asymmetric escalation”) or a “catalytic” strategy intended for the principal purpose of scaring China into intervening on North Korea’s behalf.
There are numerous reasons to be skeptical about either of these strategies. Instead, evidence and logic seem to support the idea that North Korea is seeking an assured retaliation capability in peacetime, and a wartime strategy of asymmetric escalation.
In his recent book, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era, Vipin Narang suggests three types of nuclear strategies facing nascent nuclear states: catalytic; asymmetric escalation; and assured retaliation. Nuclear posture can serve other types of purposes, but Narang makes a strong case that these are the three most relevant to politico-military strategy. In a catalytic strategy, nuclear weapons serve the purpose of bringing a patron closer to its nuclear weapon-wielding client. Asymmetric escalation relies on nuclear first-use as a way of compelling de-escalation in a crisis or conflict, or to reap political benefit. And an assured retaliation strategy deploys nuclear weapons with the aim of ensuring its nuclear force can survive any first strike on it to launch nuclear second-strikes in turn.
Surprisingly, Narang does not take up the case of North Korea in his mostly well-conceived book, but he obliges us with a spinoffarticle applying his book’s framework to North Korea. His argument, in effect, is that we should expect North Korea to choose a catalytic nuclear strategy that would scare China into joining a conflict on its side, assuming North Korea believes China would be reasonably likely to do so. If North Korea does not see China as a likely or reliable patron, then North Korea would likely move to an asymmetric escalation posture. The historical basis for this logic is most closely found in the case of South Africa, whose nuclear posture was intended to draw the United States into protecting it against a potential Soviet threat during the Cold War. I find this line of reasoning to be completely rational, and completely wrong.
Unsurprisingly, you’ll find nary a Korea watcher who thinks North Korea’s nuclear weapons are about China, and I happen to think they’re correct about that narrow point. Empirically, in the context of Sino-North Korean relations, a catalytic strategy ignores several historical and contemporary realities. One is that North Korea has a history of foreign policy independence from China even as it has tried to extract resources and security benefits from it. Another is North Korea’s juche (roughly but not precisely translated as “self-reliance”) ethos, which would be unlikely to allow it to pursue a deliberate strategy of dependence on another state. This isn’t to say that North Korea wouldn’t seek Chinese support in a conflict; it almost certainly would, and did in 1950. But that’s a distinct question from whether they would pursue effectively a defense strategy that couldn’t be executed without relying on the Chinese. A third challenge to the catalytic argument is the distant nature of North Korea’s contemporary relationship with China, which has grown increasingly strained since Kim Jong-un ascended to power.
There are also logical problems with the claim of a North Korean nuclear strategy designed as primarily catalytic. It is difficult to concede that a new nuclear state would leverage its nuclear status for the deliberate purpose of drawing others to its side. Drawing such a conclusion is difficult not simply because chain-ganging is rare, but also because of Narang’s caveat that North Korea would only choose a catalytic strategy if it believed its patron’s security commitment would be credible. If the patron’s security commitment is not credible, which is often the case in international relations, then the catalytic approach makes no sense. Yet if the security commitment is credible, then a catalytic nuclear strategy would be unnecessary because patron intervention would be expected anyway.
Asymmetric Escalation in War, Not in Peace
So if a catalytic posture can’t be taken seriously as nuclear strategy, then North Korea is effectively left with asymmetric escalation and assured retaliation strategies. A couple months ago I debated precisely this question with a couple of colleagues at a small seminar in Washington, which can be viewed here. I partially disagree with what seems to be the prevailing wisdom: North Korea intends its nuclear weapons for the purpose of asymmetric escalation, partly because I find cause to separate peacetime and wartime nuclear logics…
