Method to the madness of Chairman Kim: The instrumental rationality of North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons
| Date | 01 March 2014 |
| Author | Youngwon Cho |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702013518489 |
| Published date | 01 March 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essays |
Scholarly Essay
International Journal
2014, Vol. 69(1) 5–25
! The Author(s) 2014
Method to the madness
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of Chairman Kim: The
DOI: 10.1177/0020702013518489
ijx.sagepub.com
instrumental rationality
of North Korea’s pursuit
of nuclear weapons
Youngwon Cho
Department of Political Science, St Francis Xavier University,
Antigonish, NS, Canada
Abstract
For two decades the Korean peninsula has been mired in a perilous nuclear brinkman-
ship with no end in sight. The paralysis is attributable in part to the widespread per-
ception of North Korea as a ‘‘rogue’’ if not ‘‘mad’’ state, whose security concerns are
seen as irrational, paranoiac, and illegitimate. Despite its eccentricities, however,
Pyongyang is fundamentally a rational actor pursuing a rational strategy to deal with
rational security concerns. Profound structural changes in the international system have
rendered North Korea incapable of addressing its security anxiety through either inter-
nal balancing by conventional arms buildup or external balancing by alliance formation.
In this context, nuclearization offers a logical and inexpensive route for Pyongyang to
restore the military balance in the Korean peninsula and ensure its own survival.
Keywords
North Korea, nuclear weapons, proliferation, Korean peninsula, East Asian security
After two decades, the long, convoluted road to finding a satisfactory resolution to
the seemingly perpetual crisis generated by North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weap-
ons appears to be inching toward a dead end. Neither the carrots offered nor the
sticks wielded since the first nuclear crisis in the Korean peninsula in 1993–1994
have been enough to halt Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.1 Quite the
1.
On the crisis of 1993–1994, see Joel Wit, Daniel Poneman, and Robert Gallucci, The First North
Korean Nuclear Crisis: Going Critical (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2004). On why neither
Corresponding author:
Youngwon Cho, Department of Political Science, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS B2G 2W5,
Canada.
Email: ycho@stfx.ca
6
International Journal 69(1)
contrary: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has conducted
nuclear tests three times, engaged in repeated and increasingly threatening ballistic
missile tests, launched a second track to its nuclear weapons program by building a
technologically sophisticated industrial uranium enrichment facility, and, in a spate
of escalating displays of belligerence, sunk a naval vessel of the Republic of Korea
(ROK) in the spring of 2010 and shelled an ROK island in the fall of the same
year.2 If these highly provocative and seemingly rash actions are a reflection of the
failure of the international community to wrestle with the challenge of nuclear
proliferation in the Korean peninsula, they also do nothing to alter North
Korea’s reputation as an unpredictable, enigmatic, and downright ‘‘crazy’’ state,
a reputation that, permeating much of the public discourse on the DPRK, has
proven to be a stubborn stumbling block to finding a reasoned and reasonable
solution to a problem that is turning into a ‘‘twenty years’ crisis.’’ Pyongyang
remains as enigmatic as it ever was, and the world simply does not know how to
deal with it.
If one’s aim is to know what is actually going on inside the Hermit Kingdom,
North Korea is indeed an enigma. Given the totalitarian grip of the Kim regime,
the impregnable firewalls isolating the DPRK, and the sheer opacity of a decision-
making process that makes the Kremlin politics of the Soviet era look like a trans-
parent exercise, there is a dearth of reliable information on which to assess North
Korea’s behaviour. Instead, propaganda and rumour dominate, fed both by
Pyongyang and its enemies, for ideological and political purposes. This is one
country where the experts’ and area specialists’ assessment seems almost as good
as anyone else’s guess, rendering the moniker ‘‘informed observer’’ of North Korea
a difficult credential to establish. The result is an endless stream of speculation on
what might motivate North Korea’s behaviour, what might explain its desire for
nuclear weapons, what might dissuade it from pursuing nuclearization, and what
might induce North Korea to behave more ‘‘normally.’’
Much of this speculation rests on a problematic tendency to impute intention to
Pyongyang’s behaviour by extrapolating from its internal attributes and characters.
Thus, in a classic nod to the second-image reading of international politics,3 North
Korea’s nuclear quest and its implications are explained with reference to the
regime’s character and variables internal to the DPRK. A popular version of
this interpretation, prevalent among the neoconservatives in the United States
and the anti-Pyongyang conservatives in South Korea, is the view that North
Korea acts ‘‘crazy’’ because it is a consummate rogue state that cannot
help itself. The regime is impervious to the plight of its own people and sorely
carrots nor sticks have worked, see Andrei Lankov, ‘‘Why the United States will have to accept a
nuclear North Korea,’’ Korean Journal of Defense Analysis 21, no. 3 (2009): 251–264.
2.
There is an ongoing, bitter controversy in South Korea over the exact cause of the sinking of
Cheonan, with vocal skeptics facing lawsuits, censorship, and even prosecution. For instance, a
dissenting member of the joint civilian-military investigation panel faced criminal charges for def-
amation because he questioned the official conclusion.
3.
Kenneth Waltz, Man, State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1959).
Cho
7
lacks moral legitimacy; its external behaviour thus has no legitimate grounds either;
and because the regime is rogue, North Korea’s nuclear ambition can only mean
that it has an aggressive and sinister design. In short, the DPRK acts badly and
erratically because of its internal defects, because it has a bad and erratic regime
in power.4
That North Korea is ruled by a brutal regime of dubious, if not non-existent,
legitimacy is a self-evident truth that is universally accepted by everyone who has a
head and a heart. Its atrociously repressive policies are so many and so repulsive
that one is compelled to see why George W. Bush loathed Kim Jong Il so intensely,
even if one disagrees with the unproductive policy stance derived from the former
US president’s contemptuous attitude.5 The detestable nature of the Kim regime,
however, offers neither a theoretically firm ground nor an analytically useful lens to
understand the fundamental rationale behind North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear
weapons. Moral outrage or ideological passion is usually not a good place to
begin any serious inquiry; it ought to be possible to posit, without facing accus-
ations of being a North Korean sympathizer or an apologist for the Kim dynasty,
that even a morally bankrupt state has a set of national security concerns that are
rationally derived from the anarchic structure of the international system. Under
the condition of anarchy, insecurity does not discriminate against ‘‘bad’’ states, as
though moral failures are sufficient to make their security concerns invalid. Good
or bad, well behaved or rogue, democratic or authoritarian, all states are subject to
the same structural constraints of the international system that breed insecurity and
compel them to seek a remedy.6
Leaving aside the particularities of the North Korean regime, this article pro-
vides a structurally driven, rational explanation of Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear
weapons. While plenty of existing work insists that the DPRK’s quest for nuclear
weapons cannot be explained fully without taking into account its regime type and
other internal attributes, I argue that structural factors are so preponderant in the
strategic environment of North Korea that they provide on their own a sufficient
4.
There are more nuanced second-image analyses that do not fall into this neoconservative trap of
conflating the moral qualities of the North Korean regime with its external behaviour. Some
emphasize the insecurity of the regime or the internal structure of decision making in North
Korea as a factor behind its pursuit of nuclearization. As Samuel Kim notes, however, even
these internal attributes are inexorably linked to, and amplified by, North Korea’s extremely
unfavourable external security situation. To a large extent, the problem of legitimacy faced by
the Kim regime, especially its economic failures, and the changing structure of decision making
that saw the rise of the military to prominence, are derived from the structural challenges confront-
ing North Korea. See Samuel Kim, ‘‘North Korea’s nuclear strategy and the interface between
international and domestic politics,’’ Asian Perspective 34, no. 1 (2010): 49–85.
5.
See Charles Pritchard, Failed Diplomacy: The Tragic Story of How North Korea Got the Bomb
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007); Gregory Moore, ‘‘America’s failed North
Korea nuclear policy: A new approach,’’ Asian Perspectives 32, no. 4 (2008): 9–27; Roy Kim,
‘‘Playing with fire: The United States’ nuclear policy toward North Korea,’’ Korean Journal of
Defense Analysis 19, no. 2 (2007): 21–45; and Chung-in Moon and Jon-Yung Bae, ‘‘The Bush
Doctrine and the North Korean nuclear crisis,’’ Asian Perspective 27, no. 4 (2003): 9–45.
6.
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979).
8
International Journal 69(1)
explanation for its nuclear quest.7 North...
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