Opinion | North Korea's 'Nuclear Breakout'

By Tom Fowdy

On Jan. 2, 2017, U.S President-elect Donald Trump wrote on Twitter: "North Korea stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won't happen!". The tweet was an ominous warning which set the stage for a policy which Trump would describe as "maximum pressure" against the DPRK. The goal? To force Pyongyang to surrender its nuclear capabilities by accelerating military and economic confrontation with the country. The Trump administration would significantly increase sanctions against North Korea and threaten to "totally destroy" the country with "fire and fury" before finally, settling to negotiate with Kim Jong-un the following year with a leader-to-leader summit in Singapore.

Whilst it was long clear that these summits failed to procure any major concessions or deals with North Korea, it is only now that is completely conceivable that the legacy of this policy, also sometimes stated as "complete verifiable irreversible denuclearization" of North Korea is one which will now go down in history books as a monumental failure, one which the succeeding Biden administration has failed to reconsider. On March 24, Kim Jong-un officially ended the self-imposed pause on Intercontinental Ballistic Missile testing (ICBM) declared before those meetings with Trump, and unleashed an ICBM test of a model known as the Hwaseong-17.

The missile is reported to have reached an altitude of 6248km into space and flew for over an hour, illustrating its capacity on a normal trajectory to reach up to 13,000km, which can hit any target in the world short of South America, which of course includes all of the continental United States. The following morning, North Korea's official party newspaper Rodong Sinmun quoted Kim Jong-un as saying "It is necessary to make clear that whoever tries to infringe upon the security of our state shall pay dearly… "Our state defence capability will make thorough preparations for long confrontation with U.S. imperialism on the basis of the tremendous military technical force unflinching even to any military threat and blackmail."

Although the DPRK had tested the Hwaseong-14 and 15 ICBM's in 2017, the Hwaseong-17 as revealed last year is a whole new ball game, making it a big moment for North Korea, as Tal Inbar, a senior research fellow at the Israel-based Missile Defence Advocacy Alliance, quoted: "The data indicates the success of the launch, and if it is the same huge missile [unveiled in 2020], then this country has a real and credible global attack capability with nuclear weapons". It amounts to an effective consolidation of Pyongyang's longstanding ambitions, which as Trump said he would prevent, to establish a missile capability able to hit the United States itself.

This benchmark is important for Pyongyang because it allows it to establish "strategic deterrence". As Kim's rhetoric suggests, North Korea is not looking to pre-emptively or randomly attack the US, as mainstream media hysteria often misleads, but to consolidate a retaliatory ability so that the United States itself or its allies cannot attack North Korea, in the same way they are unwilling to do so against Russia or China. This scenario would make Pyongyang only the third opponent of the United States who has achieved such a threshold, and the only small-scale adversary to do so. The US vigorously enforces the "non-proliferation regime" against its opponents because if they are able to acquire nuclear weapons, it erodes their own military supremacy across the globe.

Thus, whilst the US and its allies successfully prevented Iran, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Gadhafi's Libya and Assad's Syria from attaining nuclear capabilities, North Korea has achieved its "nuclear breakout" moment whereby attempts to stop it, largely due to Pyongyang's clever diplomatic manoeuvring, its willingness to endure costs in terms of sanctions and its all-out emphasis on national survival as a priority. Now that the DPRK has seemingly reached this benchmark, it is not however the end of the road. Rather, Pyongyang has committed itself again to a path of confrontation. It will continue to test more ICBMs to consolidate its capability, is widely expected to pursue another nuclear test and is seeking to establish hypersonic missiles and submarine launch capabilities.

With geopolitical tensions and upheavals worldwide having fragmented the United Nations Security Council, owing to Russia's war in Ukraine and differences between the US and China, North Korea also now sees a perfect window of opportunity to push further without any coordinated response against it. The biggest takeaway however is that whilst the country is isolated and poor, it has nonetheless now established itself as a check on American power against all odds. Policies to try and denuclearize the country by coercion have failed drastically, and the window the US once had to make a compromise deal has firmly closed. For Pyongyang to concede its ICBM capabilities would ultimately require a reciprocal concession from Washington of such a scale which would compromise its own presence on the Korean peninsula itself. One hopes the US will soon wake up and realize its failure.

The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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