Reading Them Wrong
By 
Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker are concerned that this time Kim Jong Un may really mean his threats of war. Both are experienced watchers of North Korea.
There does seem to be something different about the current threats. Kim has declared South Korea no longer a missing part of the true Korea, but rather an implacable enemy. He has cut off interactions between the two countries. He has made a number of threats, including that North Korea has tested an underwater drone that can cause a “nuclear tsunami.”
If that drone sounds familiar, it should. It is one of the triad of supposedly new technologies that Vladimir Putin introduced in 2018. We can’t see the tests because the drone is underwater, but Kim assures us, as Putin did for the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile, that all tests have been successful. Neither is in production, however. The one of Putin’s triad that has gone into production, the Kinzhal missile, is proving easier to shoot down in Ukraine than its advance publicity indicated.
Which is a long way of saying that that part of Kim’s threats is exaggerated, as his rhetoric has been in the past. Of course he knows that a nuclear war involving the United States would be the end of himself and North Korea. But making threats and shooting off missiles in the general direction of South Korea can go awry.
Hecker makes an important point that applies across other difficult world situations. US responses to North Korea have been counterproductive.
Even after the Agreed Framework fell apart in 2002, the North tried to pull the US back into serious talks by giving unprecedented access to the nuclear center at Yongbyon to one of us (Hecker). During the Barack Obama Administration, the North made several attempts that Washington not only failed to probe but, in one case, rejected out of hand.
For those of us who had been involved in working with the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, the purpose of North Korea’s invitation to Hecker was obvious. Hecker had been a leader in setting up cooperation to secure nuclear materials and upgrade accountability systems. At a lower level, after Estonia secured EU support to stabilize the giant tailings pond at Sillamäe, in which I was involved, I had inquiries from other countries that needed help with cleaning up Soviet radioactive messes. North Korea wanted a serious interaction with the United State on nuclear matters.
Hecker was given amazing access to North Korea’s nuclear programs. But the US government did not want to engage. Hecker now suspects that North Korea has given up trying.
On social media, I see China hawks crowing about the precarious relations with North Korea and Iran as well. We have a faction in the US that is happy to paint those they perceive as enemies with the worst motivations possible.
But we need to look beyond those cartoons and understand those countries’ motivations. Only then can we take actions to move away from war and toward peace.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner