No Nukes

6 October 2003


Pyongyang is Bluffing

Two stories in the media last week merit joint consideration: the fact that many Iraqi soldiers and scientists lied to their superiors about having weapons of mass destruction and the announcement by North Korea that it has reprocessed 8,000 nuclear fuel rods to produce six to twelve atomic weapons. The former foreshadows the latter because, in bluntest terms, the North Koreans are probably lying to the world.

The logic of WMD since 1945 has been that their widely known existence and well-understood awfulness precludes their use and the use of lesser weapons. The Mutually Assured Destruction that existed between Moscow and Washington ensured that the Third World War was fought in the jungles of Vietnam and the mountains of Afghanistan rather than in a brief exchange of radiation involving more desirable real estate.

However, if the idea is to deter an attack, it is not necessary for a nation to possess nukes, bio-weapons or tons of good old-fashioned mustard gas. It must merely convince its rivals that it has them. As anyone who has played the American national game, poker, can attest, bluffing works a great many times when nothing else can. History is replete with examples. And for the North Koreans, it is far easier to pretend to have The Bomb than it is to produce it.

There is another poker stratagem that works against bluffing. When one holds a strong hand, one can call the opposition's bluff, as the Americans did in Iraq. The US, to beat the analogy to death, may not have a royal flush, but it has four aces against North Korea's pair of twos. The US can militarily destroy the Pyongyang government (albeit at the cost of South Korea), the Chinese are getting annoyed with their neighbor, and the Russians have made it clear that they want quiet in northeast Asia.

It is time to crank up the PR offensive. The State Department, CIA, DIA and NSA should begin an organized campaign to call this bluff. Until the Pyongyang regime successfully tests such a weapon, the rest of the world needs to believe that the claim is so much hot air. The pressure in a totalitarian state to pass good news up the chain of command is overwhelming, as happened in Iraq. For that reason alone, one doubts the North Korean claim.

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