‘Solving’ North Korea

Never mind the legalities. Never mind morality. Just answer the question: Is it ever a good idea to start a nuclear war?

Because that’s the notion that US president Donald Trump is actually playing with.

He didn’t say exactly that, of course. He said: “If China is not going to solve [the nuclear threat from] North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you.”

But in the context of that interview with the Financial Times, it was clear what he meant. Trump was saying that if China did not use the tools at its disposal (political influence, trade sanctions, withholding financial aid) to make North Korea give up its nuclear weapons and long-range rockets, then the US would use the tools at its disposal (the world’s most powerful armed forces) to accomplish the goal.

This does not necessarily mean that the US would launch a large nuclear attack against North Korea. If you are really serious about carrying out a “disarming strike” that destroys all of North Korea’s nukes, you probably should do exactly that.

But maybe the US Air Force would promise that “precision” non-nuclear weapons could accomplish that goal, and maybe some gullible people would believe it. It would still turn into a nuclear war in the end, unless American “surgical strikes” miraculously eliminated every last one of North Korea’s nukes at the same time.

Kim Jong-un’s regime would find itself in the position known as “use them or lose them”, and it is hard to believe it would not launch whatever it had left. The targets would be in South Korea, of course, but probably also US bases in Japan.

Maybe even Japanese cities, if North Korea had enough weapons left. The regime would know it was going under so it would take as many of its enemies as possible down with it.

North America would probably not be hit, because Western intelligence services do not believe that Pyongyang has ballistic missiles that can reach that far yet. (But “intelligence” could be wrong.)

At worst, the victims would be one or two cities in the Pacific north-west of the US. This would be a bad outcome for people living in Seattle or Portland, but it would not actually be a “nuclear holocaust”.

The kind of war that the super-powers would have fought at the height of the Cold War, with thousands of nuclear weapons used by each side, would have killed hundreds of millions. A nuclear war over Korea would be a much smaller catastrophe, perhaps involving a few million deaths – unless China got drawn in. Unfortunately, that is not inconceivable, because China, much as it dislikes and mistrusts the North Korean regime, is determined not to see it destroyed.

Donald Trump is the fourth US president to be faced with the challenge of North Korean nuclear weapons, and none of them has found a safe and effective way of dealing with it.

But all the others avoided making open threats of violence, because that would probably just make matters worse. Of course, Trump may just be bluffing. In fact, he almost certainly is.

But if your bluff is called, you have to go through with your threat or accept being humiliated.

The Donald doesn’t do humiliation.