How Close is War with North Korea?

Few realize how close the United States came to war with North Korea in 1994, when Pyongyang’s nuclear program was first discovered by U.S. spy satellites. The Clinton White House was unwilling to allow plutonium reprocessing underway at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor and came up with a plan to bomb it. They figured they could destroy the facility and entomb radioactive material in one stroke with precision airstrikes. The catch: North Korea would likely retaliate with a massive artillery and missile barrage on Seoul and elsewhere in South Korea, sparking all-out war on the peninsula. Pentagon officials calculated that the ensuing battles would likely leave between 300,000 and 500,000 American and South Korean soldiers dead along with hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Such a war was only days away from unfolding in 1994. For the best account of the saga, see Don Oberdorfer’s excellent book the Two Koreas, which goes a long way towards explaining why North Korea remains such a dangerous and difficult issue for the current White House.

In the 1994 crisis, the bombing of the Yongbyon reactor loomed as the trigger for what would surely be the bloodiest fighting seen in Asia since Vietnam. An eleventh-hour political bargain between Washington and Pyongyang diffused the situation. But North Korea’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons poses a new trigger for such a war today. U.S. Naval intercepts of North Korean vessels thought to be carrying nuclear materials could occur in the seeable future as Washington grows increasingly worried and watchful of what comes and goes off the North Korean coast. North Korea has already said it would consider such intercepts an act of war and warned South Korea not to cooperate with U.S. Naval efforts.

It’s hard to know, honestly, how strongly North Korea would react if the United States or South Korea captured one of its ships carrying nuclear weapons or materials. Would North Korea’s leadership beat their chests or bomb Seoul? Pyongyang regularly airs venomous war rhetoric towards the United States and South Korea, much of which can be dismissed as the wackiness of a hermetic Stalinist regime. But I suspect that North Korea would be willing to fight for real over the one national treasure the desperately impoverished country holds, nukes. Which means a war like one the United States and North Korea were both ready to fight in 1994 may be nearer than we realize.

Who Controls Pakistan’s Nukes?

Pakistani leaders in recent days have gone out of their way to assure Washington that the country’s nuclear weapons are in safe hands, i.e. out of the reach of the Taliban and their confederates in al-Qeada. No one in Washington should find much comfort in this. Elements of the military establishment supposedly controlling Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal are openly sympathetic toward the very Islamic militants now battling the government for control of territory inside the country. The civilian government in Islamabad in fact is hoping for a return to the supposed Taliban truce. That "truce" essentially ceded whole portions of the country to fundamentalists brazenly vowing to host followers of Osama bin Laden, who has already made attempts to get a hold of a Pakistani nuclear weapon.

In other words, Pakistan’s nukes are already in the wrong hands, because the government may not be willing or able to fully ensure they are not gotten by militants increasingly thick on the ground in Pakistan after them. This has been the case for some time, as we know from the alarming disclosures of proliferation profiteering by Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan. How much worse the situation can get remains to be seen. But it is a safe bet to assume that whatever nuclear safeguards the Pakistani government has in place are eroding along with the breakdown of law and order surrounding Taliban advances.