North Korea Seems Likely to Use Nuclear Weapons First: America Needs to Think It Through

Key Points and Summary – U.S.–South Korea drills now assume North Korea could use nuclear weapons first.

-Washington faces two realistic paths. One is to step back and allow Seoul to build its own nuclear deterrent, de-risking the U.S. while preserving credible deterrence. The other is to threaten overwhelming U.S. retaliation to prevent any DPRK first use—a pledge that is hard to make credible given escalation risks.

A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor is launched from the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska in Kodiak, Alaska, during Flight Experiment THAAD (FET)-01 on July 30, 2017 (EDT). During the test, the THAAD weapon system successfully intercepted an air-launched, medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) target.

-Because Pyongyang’s regime is brittle and incentivized to escalate early, insisting on U.S. nuclear guarantees may be unsustainable.

-The pragmatic alternative: let South Korea choose its defense posture, including nuclearization, to manage the growing threat over the peninsula.

The North Korea Nuclear Threat Keeps Getting Worse 

The U.S. and South Korea will complete joint military exercises this month to improve interoperability. North Korea will make its typical threats and rattle its nuclear saber. Nothing will likely come of it, but North Korea’s nuclear threats have become routine – Pyongyang has issued several just this year.

The persistence of its language strongly suggests that North Korea would use nuclear weapons first in a conflict on the peninsula. Indeed, U.S. and South Korea’s exercises now appear to take this possibility into consideration. It is unclear just how the United States and South Korea, as well as Japan, would respond to North Korean first-use. The administration of former U.S. President Joseph Biden said the North Korean regime would not survive nuclear use, although it stopped short of saying the U.S. would use nuclear weapons in response.

But the use of nuclear weapons would be a tremendous global shock. It would spark worldwide panic and possibly apocalyptic religious hysteria. No one really knows what would happen on the “day after.” In the face of North Korea’s nuclear threats, the United States has two realistic options.

Let South Korea Build Its Own Nuclear Weapons so That U.S. Can ‘De-Risk’ in Korea

The most obvious American answer to North Korean nuclear threats is to get out of the way.

Current U.S. President Donald Trump seems to prefer this option. Trump has made it clear that he dislikes the security burden allies place on the United States, particularly the nuclear risk involved in confronting Russia. Trump has made it repeatedly clear that he fears World War III. But because it is weak and vulnerable, North Korea is far more likely than Russia to use a nuclear weapon.

North Korea would not threaten the United States with nuclear retaliation if the U.S. were not allied with South Korea. And South Korea’s (very unlikely) defeat by North Korea would not be a huge blow to U.S. security. So it is unclear whether the U.S. would be willing to carry meaningful nuclear risk for a mid-sized ally such as South Korea. It has been unwilling to do so for Ukraine, a similarly exposed mid-sized partner.

The obvious option here is to simply let South Korea build its own nukes. Deterrence would remain credible, even without clear U.S. backing of South Korea. British and French nuclear weapons bolster NATO nuclear deterrence in Europe. It seems reasonable to suggest South Korean nukes would do the same in East Asia.

Threaten Massive Retaliation Against North Korea to Prevent It From Ever Going Nuclear

If the United States is unwilling to let South Korea carry more of the nuclear deterrence load – likely because the U.S. strongly opposes nuclear proliferation, even among democracies – then the only other alternative to nuclear warfighting is to threaten North Korea so much that it would not dare to use its nukes in the first place.

This is a huge challenge, because North Korea is conventionally much weaker than the states arrayed against it. Its nuclear weapons help even out the highly unbalanced conventional forces arrayed on the Korean Peninsula.

First use is an obvious choice for North Korea when conventional defeat would mean regime collapse. Because the North Korean state is brittle, it is entirely possible that the stresses of war would shake the regime apart – even if the North were not immediately defeated on the battlefield. This is what happened to czarist Russia in World War I. Stopping any conflict as soon as possible would be the regime’s primary goal. It would be highly motivated to prevent a massive conventional defeat at the demilitarized zone sparking military collapse. The shock of using nuclear weapons is probably the only way to achieve that.

Given these high incentives for North Korean nuclear use, the U.S. would have to threaten even greater punishment to prevent first use. That would almost certainly mean threatening a massive U.S. nuclear counter-strike. The U.S. has been unwilling to make that commitment. Indeed, it is not clear the U.S. even could credibly commit to such an extreme course of action.

Just Let South Korea Make Its Own Choices

North Korea’s nuclear weapons are designed to force these terrible choices on the U.S. and its allies. As the North Korean nuclear threat expands, and as the logic of North Korean nuclear first use grows, the U.S. commitment to South Korea – to risk a nuclear strike on the U.S. homeland for a small, distant ally – will seem less believable.

Instead of making extreme nuclear commitments to compensate for that credibility gap, the U.S. should simply let South Korea make its own defense choices – including nuclearization – so that it can manage the North Korean threat itself.

About the Author: Dr. Robert E. Kelly, Pusan National University 

Robert E. Kelly is a professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Pusan National University. You can follow him on X: @Robert_E_Kelly.