Like others who have had the temerity to chart an independent course, the rulers of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) have been routinely described by our policymakers and pundits as mentally imbalanced. Senior Defense Department officials refer to the DPRK as a country “not of this planet,” led by “dysfunctional” autocrats. One US government official suggested that they might be “really totally crazy.”31
In addition, North Korea has been characterized as a most sinister power. To be sure, there have been things about the DPRK that can give one pause, including its dynastic leadership system, its highly dictatorial one-party rule, and the chaos that seems implanted in its “planned” economy. By 2010, North Korea was undergoing a sharp currency devaluation that was wiping out people’s savings and making life still harder.32
Less publicized in the US media were North Korea’s repeated overtures, dating from the early 1990s, for a bilateral nonaggression pact with the United States, all rejected by Washington. In 2006 the DPRK grandly announced that it had successfully conducted a nuclear weapons test; another test followed in 2009. Were the North Koreans playing brinkmanship, or did they know something about US global policy that US rulers preferred to leave unsaid? In short, the United States has never attacked or invaded any nation that has a nuclear arsenal (except for the NATO bombing forays into Pakistan during the Afghanistan conflict).
Of the numerous countries directly battered by US-supported military actions in the decades after World War II, none wielded a nuclear deterrence at the time they were attacked. During the Korean War (1950–1953), the United States carpet-bombed the North without stint and with impunity, dropping more explosives (635,000 tons and 32,557 tons of napalm) than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II, without the slightest concern for the immense toll taken on civilian life and the North’s infrastructure.33
Consider more recent events. In the aftermath of 9/11, US president George W. Bush claimed the right to initiate any military action against any “terrorist” nation, organization, or individual of his choosing, thereby transforming the president into something of an absolute monarch who could exercise life-and-death power over any quarter of the Earth, regardless of international law and the US Constitution.34 Needless to say, numerous nations—the DPRK among them—were discomforted by the president’s self-elevation to King of the Planet.
It was only in 2008 that President Bush finally removed North Korea from a list of states that allegedly sponsor terrorism. But from Pyongyang’s viewpoint, there remained another more devilishly disquieting hit list. In December 2001, two months after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney referred chillingly to “forty or fifty countries” that might need “military disciplining.”35 A month later in his 2002 State of the Union message, President Bush pruned the list down to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, three culprits who, he said, composed an axis of evil.
First to get hit was Iraq, nation #1 of the axis of evil in a war that has reduced that country to shambles. North Korea could not help but notice what was happening to Iraq, nor could it overlook the subsequent threats directed at Iran, axis nation #2. Rather than passively await its fate sitting in Washington’s crosshairs as nation #3 on the US hit list, the DPRK began boldly announcing that it had a “powerful nuclear deterrence” ready to use if necessary.36 Such bluster—obviously designed to act as a defense—was characterized in US official circles and media as wild aggression. In May 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the United States would not be “blackmailed by North Korea.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates fulminated, “We will not stand idly by as North Korea builds the capability to wreak destruction on any target in Asia—or on us.” President Obama condemned the DPRK’s “unacceptable” and “belligerent behavior” as posing a “grave threat.” 37
In June 2009, the UN Security Council unanimously passed a US-sponsored resolution ratcheting up the financial, trade, and military sanctions against North Korea, a nation already hard hit by sanctions. In response to this action, Kim Jong-il’s government announced it would no longer “even think about giving up its nuclear weapons” and would produce still more of them.
US leaders refused to guarantee that they would not try to topple Pyongyang’s communist government. There was talk of putting the DPRK back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, though Secretary Clinton admitted that there was no evidence to support such a designation.38
From its lonely and precarious perch North Korea could not help feeling somewhat vulnerable. The DPRK’s outdated and ill-equipped army was no match for the conventional forces of the United States, South Korea, and Japan. The United States maintained a large attack base in South Korea. At least once a year the US military conducted joint exercises with South Korean forces, practicing a land invasion of the North. The US Air Force had nuclear arsenals in Okinawa, Guam, and Hawaii. Japan not only said it could produce nuclear bombs within a year, it seemed increasingly willing to do so.39
The DPRK’s nuclear arsenal is a two-edged sword. It might deter attack or invite attack. It might cause US officials to think twice before cinching a tighter knot around the North, or it might cause Washington to move aggressively toward a risky confrontation. After years of encirclement and demonization by Washington, the Pyongyang leaders were convinced that the best way to deter superpower aggression was by developing a nuclear arsenal. It does not really sound so crazy. Having been pushed to the brink for so long, the North Koreans by 2010 were taking a gamble, pursuing an arguably “sane” deterrence policy in the otherwise insane world configured by a voracious empire.