{"id":6643,"date":"2013-05-29T14:30:23","date_gmt":"2013-05-29T04:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=6643"},"modified":"2013-05-30T09:37:03","modified_gmt":"2013-05-29T23:37:03","slug":"time-for-double-or-nothing-with-north-korea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/time-for-double-or-nothing-with-north-korea\/","title":{"rendered":"Time for double or nothing with North Korea"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Two<\/a><\/p>\n

In\u00a0a recent article<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0Foreign Affairs<\/i>, Robert Art and Robert Jervis wrote about the late Kenneth Waltz\u2019s unique contribution to the field of international politics.\u00a0 One of the things Waltz brought to his research was an interest in economics and, as Art and Jervis note, that interest made Waltz focus on incentives. So let\u2019s have a look at the incentives on the current North Korean nuclear issue.<\/p>\n

At the moment, we hold out to Pyongyang the incentive that it can have a proper economy and become a fully-fledged member of the international community if it renounces its nuclear program.\u00a0 We pair that incentive with a matching disincentive: that if North Korea proceeds down the nuclear path it will find itself subjected to increasingly stringent sanctions and international isolation.<\/p>\n

That incentive structure hasn\u2019t changed much over the last two decades. But any observer of North Korean behaviour over that time would have to conclude that those incentives don\u2019t seem to be delivering the desired outcome. North Korea has now conducted three nuclear tests, all of small but gradually increasing yield, and has opened a second pathway\u2014uranium enrichment\u2014to the production of fissile material, alongside its earlier plutonium reprocessing efforts. It has constructed a missile that can put a satellite into orbit. True, the satellite\u2019s probably pretty lightweight, but the launch vehicle is clearly the basis of an intercontinental delivery system.<\/p>\n

So maybe it\u2019s time to try something new. At the moment we\u2019re leaving Pyongyang free to tilt the nuclear balance on the Korean peninsula in its own favour.\u00a0 And Kim Jong-un, like his father, seems to believe that the gain to be derived from doing that outweighs the disincentives in the current reward and punishment pattern. We have to take that incentive away.<\/p>\n

The current insistence by Beijing that the North should return to a path of dialogue seems to do little to change the basic calculation. Perhaps it\u2019s time that we started playing a game of \u2018double or nothing\u2019 with North Korea. Washington should make clear to Pyongyang that for every warhead the North is believed to possess, the US will deploy two in South Korea.\u00a0 But it should simultaneously make clear that for every warhead the North subsequently reduces, the US will withdraw two of its own warheads from the South. The game must reward North Korea\u2019s dismantlement just as fairly as it punishes construction.<\/p>\n

North Korea is credited with probably having about ten warheads at the moment, so the US should station twenty in South Korea.\u00a0 If the North proceeds to lift its arsenal to twenty warheads, the US would lift its deployment level to forty. Alternatively, if the North drops to five, the US drops to ten.<\/p>\n

There are only two end points in this game: a North Korea that continues down the nuclear path but finds itself on the losing side of a titling nuclear balance, or a North Korea that moves progressively back towards zero, and pulls US deployments down to the same level.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s one central difficulty in playing the game: we don\u2019t know exactly how many warheads the North has.\u00a0 Nor is our publicly-available information sufficiently granular to be able to detect the construction and dismantlement of single warheads by Pyongyang.\u00a0 And it is certainly in Pyongyang\u2019s interest to keep it that way.\u00a0 So we might just have to play the game based on agreed estimates and work the formula to the nearest five warheads.\u00a0 Still, that wouldn\u2019t destroy the logic of the game. Playing double or nothing would bring a whole new set of incentives to the North Korean problem.<\/p>\n

Those new incentives can happily co-exist alongside the old. And they have their own limits: for example, they don\u2019t entirely solve the problem of North Korean nuclear testing and missile launches. But they’re meant to eat away at the core advantage that Kim Jong-un believes he gains from a continuation of his broad nuclear program\u2014a slow repositioning of the nuclear balance on the peninsula, to the North\u2019s advantage.<\/p>\n

Rod Lyon is a non-residential fellow at ASPI.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0a recent article\u00a0in\u00a0Foreign Affairs, Robert Art and Robert Jervis wrote about the late Kenneth Waltz\u2019s unique contribution to the field of international politics.\u00a0 One of the things Waltz brought to his research was an interest …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":6646,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[41,86,27,31],"class_list":["post-6643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-asian-century","tag-north-korea","tag-northeast-asia","tag-united-states"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTime for double or nothing with North Korea | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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