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Originally posted by RoseRose
Thinking about your assesment, it seems very realistic. I like your analysis, and after a term of international pollitics at the college level, plus being a history major, so with a good hunk of history knowledge behind me, it seems rather accurate. I suppose the only place to question is in the sanity of the leaders of N. Korea, which we really can't know... and Stalin wasn't all that sane, anyway. Lack of sanity doesn't equal use of nuclear bombs. |
Yes, it is a structural realist analysis, and I chose that largely because I think that's the way the North Koreans would defend (or rationalize) their justification for nuclear weapons. I spoke to my international politics professor the other day, and we discussed how the other powers in the region (namely, South Korea, China, and Japan) viewed North Korea's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, and he mentioned that the other powers likely (indeed,) do not share this perspective, but see North Korea as an aggressor that would like to use nuclear weapons. Ergo, the possibility for added instability, an arms race, and invocation of the security dilemma is very much possible.
...still, it just does not make any real sense for North Korea to use (or even sell) her nuclear weapons. First, nuclear weapons are rather expensive--it is unlikely that North Korea could recoup the cost in making the weapons if she sold them. That's not even mentioning that, if North Korea were to sell her nuclear weapons (however many she may have, and some estimate half a dozen at max) to a state or non-state (terrorist?) actor for actual use, it is likely that the United States and her allies will know exactly where those nukes came from, so North Korea still risks retaliation even she herself itself does not actively launch any. Second, as I just said, the cost of retaliation is too high. So North Korea nukes South Korea, or Japan, or absolute worst-case scenario (in regards peculiar American interests), the North American west coast. Then what? At best, a couple million dead, and a
very pissed off, thouroughly thermonuclear United States that would have the capability (and the interest) to revisit on North Korea that horror several times over. And who would stop the United States from doing that, really? China lacks both a blue water navy and the resources to seriously deter the United States (having little more effective reach than North Korea, really: China cannot even exert her power over a small island some few miles off her coastline). I doubt Russia would be eager to get involved in a nuclear (or thermonuclear) crossfire--assuming she even knows where her nukes are, since it would be rather difficult to get involved in one if she did not know where they were.
That is to say, at the end of the day, I could care less whether North Korea has gone nuclear, or not. I worry far more about Tehran aquiring nukes (again, the potential for added instability in an area that is already far too volatile for comfort is horrificly great), and the fact that Russia doesn't seem to know where some of her nuclear weapons are (which is the most likely scenario for a non-state (non-institutional) actor to aquire nuclear weapons, in my opinion).
And this is the first thing I see.