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A Bigger Problem than our Commander in Chief
Our nuclear folly
W insloW m yers
The
well-estab-
lished assumption that
North Korea is our
most difficult and dan-
gerous foreign policy
challenge is worth a
little dispassionate ex-
amination.
North Korea is not a fun place.
If ever a nation had earned the
right to be labeled collectively
psychotic, it would be the Dem-
ocratic Republic of North Korea
under Kim Jung-un, who appar-
ently just outsourced the bizarre
assassination of his own brother.
The country possesses neither a
viable judiciary nor any kind of
religious freedom. Famine has
been a cyclical presence. Electri-
cal power is intermittent. In 2015
North Korea ranked 115th in the
world in the size of its GDP ac-
cording to U.N. statistics.
Yet nothing the United States
has tried to do, including decades
of diplomatic negotiations and the
application of severe sanctions,
has stopped this isolated conun-
drum of a country from strutting
proudly through the exclusive
doors of the nuclear club.
But let’s get real. As odd and
alienated as North Korea may be,
their leaders know perfectly well
by
that even if the United States had
not a single nuclear warhead at its
disposal, if provoked we
could bomb North Korea
until there was nothing
left but bouncing rubble.
The idea that they would
be so suicidally unwise
as to use their nuclear
weapons to launch an
unprovoked first-strike
attack upon the United States, or
South Korea for that matter, seems
utterly remote from reality.
Instead, they are pursuing
a policy—the policy of deter-
rence—which is a mirror image of
our own. But by a collective trick
of the mind, our use of weapons
of mass destruction to deter is ra-
tionalized and justified by the fact
that our intentions are good, while
from our perspective both their
intentions and their weapons are
perceived to be evil—as if there
were such a thing as good nuclear
weapons and bad nuclear weap-
ons. In this particular sense, there
is not a whit of difference between
our otherwise two very different
countries. North Korea took care-
ful note of what happened to Lib-
ya when they agreed unilaterally
to give up their nuclear program.
Their motive is self-protection,
not aggression.
It is one thing to say that de-
terrence was a temporary (now
nearly three-quarters of a century)
strategy to prevent planet-destroy-
ing war. But can we go on this
way forever, with all nine nuclear
powers committed to never mak-
ing a single error of interpretation,
never having a single equipment
failure, never succumbing to a sin-
gle computer hack? If we think we
can, we’re just as out of it as Kim
Jung-un. Our bowing to the false
idol of nuclear deterrence as the
ultimate and permanent bedrock
of international security is in its
own way as delusional as the way
the brainwashed citizens of North
Korea give absolute obeisance to
their dear leader.
If the United States, as a re-
sponsible world player, does not
move beyond the obsolete para-
digm of endless paranoid cycles of
we-build-they build; if it does not
begin to think in terms of setting
an example; if it does not begin to
participate authentically in inter-
national conferences to ban these
weapons, there is going to be a nu-
clear war in our future.
We’re uneasy with Mr. Trump’s
finger on the nuclear trigger, but
this is a bigger problem than who
specifically is commander in chief.
When the moment comes and we
begin to slide down the slippery
slope of deterrence breakdown
because of some completely unan-
ticipated dissolution of “fail-safe-
ness,” it won’t matter how expe-
rienced the human parties to the
disaster might be.
Whoever is left on this small,
no longer so beautiful planet,
freezing under the ash clouds of
nuclear winter, uselessly nursing
their boils and pustules from ra-
diation poisoning, will hate and
despise us for what we didn’t do
for decades, and they will be quite
right.
Because we know. We know
and yet we do not act on our sol-
emn obligations under the Nucle-
ar Nonproliferation Treaty. In fact
the United States actively under-
mines legitimate efforts to outlaw
nuclear weapons. We just boycot-
ted a recent one.
North Korea is a pariah nation
led by a greedy Stalinist family.
No one can say with any certain-
ty whether they could be brought
to the table to discuss abolition.
Why can’t we admit that we our-
selves harbor a similar reluctance?
The process of building trust,
agreement and verification among
the nine nuclear powers would be
the most difficult diplomatic chal-
lenge ever undertaken. The only
thing more difficult is the unthink-
able agony of the alternative.
Winslow Myers, syndicated
by PeaceVoice, is the author of
“Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s
Guide.”