North Korea's Lessons
for (Not) Building an Atomic Bomb
The Predictable
Missile Mishap That No One Predicted
Jacques E. C. Hymans, April
16, 2012
JACQUES E. C. HYMANS
is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern
California. His most recent book is Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists,
Politicians, and Proliferation (Cambridge University Press, 2012), from which
this essay is adapted.
The Tongch'ang-ni
rocket launch facility in North Korea. (Courtesy Reuters)
(key word – the poverty of standard
proliferation analysis ; examples of overestimation around the recent botched
rocket launch)
The dismal failure of
North Korea's April 13 long-range missile test -- it broke into pieces after 81
seconds [1] of flight time -- has also exposed the
poverty of standard proliferation analyses. In the days leading up to the test, most
commentators apparently took Pyongyang's technological forward march for
granted. Even the more sober voices[2] evinced little doubt
that this test would go at least as well as the country's 2009 effort, which
managed to put a rocket into flight for about fifteen minutes before it
malfunctioned. Meanwhile, other technical experts regaled readers with tales of
the "emerging" [3] bona
fide North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile [4] force,
which might soon be able to target the continental United States. And there
were renewed calls for the United States and its East Asian allies to embrace
the "Israeli option" [5]:
pre-emptive military strikes against North Korean strategic weapons facilities.
The actual results of the test, however, demonstrate that the analysts'
nightmare scenarios were hardly more credible than North Korea's own propaganda
volleys.
a long line of botched
strategic weapons tests in N. Korea ; the recent failure is not in isolation
To be sure, a single
technical failure need not condemn an entire strategic weapons program.
Pyongyang's missile mishap, however, was not a lone failure; it was merely the
latest in a long line of botched strategic weapons tests. The country's long-range missile test record [7] is
frankly pathetic: a total failure in 2006, a partial failure in 2009, and a
total failure in 2012. (A 1998 test of a medium-range missile that had been
jerry-rigged to fly a longer distance was also a partial failure.) And its
nuclear test record is almost as bad: a virtual
fizzle [8] in 2006, and a very modest blast at best [9] in
2009.
Washington's blind certainty
about the North Korean menace has long driven U.S. policy
Amazingly, the
assumption that Pyongyang already owns the very weapons that it has
consistently failed to demonstrate has long driven U.S. policy. The Clinton
administration's North Korea diplomacy was based on the belief that there was
a "better than even chance" [10] that
Pyongyang had built the bomb. The George W. Bush administration then ripped up
the Clinton-era policy because it thought that the North Koreans had cheated [11] and built even more
bombs than Clinton realized. Most recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
has gone so far as to state that "we know" [12] that
Pyongyang possesses "between one and six nuclear weapons," creating
the impression that new leader Kim Jong Un could give the order to take out
Seoul or Tokyo at any time. Given Washington's blind certainty about the North
Korean menace, it is little wonder that few analysts anticipated its latest
belly flop.
Washington's
miscalculation .. is also a result of the tendency to overestimate the pace of
global proliferation
Washington's
miscalculation is not just a product of the difficulties of seeing inside the
Hermit Kingdom. It is also a result of the broader tendency to overestimate the
pace of global proliferation. For decades, Very Serious People have predicted [13] that strategic weapons
are about to spread to every corner of the earth. Such warnings have routinely
proved wrong -- for instance, the intelligence assessments that led to the 2003
invasion of Iraq -- but they continue to be issued. In reality, despite the
diffusion of the relevant technology and the knowledge for building nuclear
weapons, the world has been experiencing a great proliferation slowdown.
Nuclear weapons programs around the world are taking much longer to get off the
ground -- and their failure rate is much higher -- than they did during the
first 25 years of the nuclear age.
the absence of strong
cultures of scientific professionalism in .. would-be nuclear states
As I explain in my
article "Botching
the Bomb [14]" in the upcoming issue of Foreign
Affairs, the key reason for the great proliferation slowdown is the absence
of strong cultures of scientific professionalism in most of the recent crop of
would-be nuclear states, which in turn is a consequence of their
poorly built political institutions. In such dysfunctional states, the
quality of technical workmanship is low, there is little coordination across
different technical teams, and technical mistakes lead not to productive
learning but instead to finger-pointing and recrimination. These problems are debilitating,
and they cannot be fixed simply by bringing in more imported parts through
illicit supply networks. In short, as a struggling proliferator, North Korea
has a lot of company.
Admittedly, the North
Korean saga is not over. Pyongyang is reportedly already preparing a new nuclear test [15]. There is reason to
be skeptical of these reports, since the country probably has very little
weapons-grade plutonium to spare, and the widespread view that it is rapidly
accumulating a highly enriched uranium stockpile [16] smells
like yet another wonky overestimation of its technical capabilities. But
whether or not North Korea carries out a successful nuclear test in the near
future, its institutional dysfunction indicates that any further progress
toward an operational nuclear arsenal is likely to remain slow and halting at
best. Among the various tigers that populate the East Asian region, this one is
made of paper.
= = = = == = = = =
Click here to read
"Botching
the Bomb [14]" from the upcoming issue of Foreign
Affairs: Nuclear weapons are hard to build for managerial reasons, Jacques
Hymans writes, not technical ones. This is why so few authoritarian regimes
have succeeded: they don’t have the right culture or institutions. When it
comes to Iran’s program, then, the United States and its allies should get out
of the way and let Iran’s worst enemies -- its own leaders -- gum up the
process on their own.
Links:
[1]
http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/13/north-koreas-rocket-gone-in-81-seconds/
[2]
http://blog.sfgate.com/pyun/2012/04/11/the-8-things-you-should-know-about-the-north-korea-missile-launch/
[3]
http://38north.org/2012/04/jpollack041012/
[4]
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/11/the_rocket_in_kim_jong_uns_pocket?page=full
[5]
http://blogs.cfr.org/asia/2012/04/11/north-koreas-missile-threat-which-country-will-be-the-israel-of-east-asia/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:
AsiaUnbound/SSnyder (Asia Unbound » Scott A. Snyder)
[6]
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/newsletters?cid=oth-in-newsletters-041312
[7] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-13/chronology-of-north-korean-missile-development/3948272
[8]
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Jungmin-Kang/2254
[9]
http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/the-north-korean-nuclear-test-what-the-seismic-data-says
[10]
http://books.google.co.jp/books?id=x9sn_SpWmiYC&pg=PA94&lpg=PA94&dq=north
korea better than even chance
sigal&source=bl&ots=pxEUiKEzA_&sig=p62sUHbgoW6lyIoXLH_HbVU8Lvs&hl=ja&sa=X&ei=Ff2JT_aZDKvImQWjoPXhCQ&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
[11]
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-10-11-north-korea-nuclear_x.htm
[12]
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2010/04/11/26/0301000000AEN20100411000200315F.HTML
[13]
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2009/01_nuclear_proliferation_yusuf.aspx
[14]
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137403/jacques-e-c-hymans/botching-the-bomb
[15]
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2012/04/09/2012040901149.html
