Nork Nukes

So, the buzz of course is about North Korea's nuclear test. You've seen the news, no need for me to link to the main reports. You may not have seen this intriguing theory: the test was a dud; North Korean nuclear scientists are now officially the worst ever.

I don't know enough to judge the science in these claims. I've been meaning to ask Prof Peter Zimmermann here in the Department of War Studies who does have that knowledge. Unfortunately, he's busy talking to journalists who aren't asking the right questions. Damn typical journos! I await enlightenment.

In the meantime, I'm amusing myself with question what does it matter? Answer (thus far): less than you might think.

The thing is that having nukes is not really as useful a thing as active proliferators reckon it is. It doesn't really expand your strategic options much. For that matter it doesn't greatly enhance your tactical power either. Eventually someone is going to set off a nuke in some confrontation and find that it doesn't change the disposition of forces all that much. The dispersal of modern combat forces makes it hard to catch enough of them to make a permanent difference. If you're going to use one you'd better use a lot, but that puts you on the escalatory chain that ends with radioactive vitrified cities.

Having a few nukes is, however, a good way of allowing you to say this even louder which I think particularly in the case of North Korea is the main point. It's effectively a failed state already which extracts financial concessions on the basis of two things: its still potent conventional military power and the fact that its total collapse would cause problems for its neighbours which they'd rather not have. But conventional military power will dwindle eventually because starving soldiers don't tend to spend their time keeping up their equipment and training; and the power of moral blackmail will cease at the point those being blackmailed begin to reckon that the toll of innocents in the long-term will be less if the regime is allowed to/encouraged to collapse--short-term pain, long-term gain. A small nuclear arsenal maintains the status quo: effectively the answer, combined with some sort of blockade or inspection to prevent further proliferation, is to put the regime of Kim Jong Il on life support. For as long as he wants. The only 'wild card' here is China. Watch what they do. In the end though, beyond being publicly pissed off I don't think there's much that they can do either.

We can live with a nuclear North Korea--indeed, we have been for a while now, the tests confirmed what we'd already known. I'm not confident, however, that the same applies to Iran. 'Deterrence' works with North Korea in some form because the North Korean leadership doesn't want to die. Thank G*d for atheism! In the absence of an afterlife KJI would as likely as not prefer to go out the natural way: sipping cognac and watching tv in bed with company. This is not at all the attitude of Iran's leadership. The Ayatollah Khomeini put it clearly and chillingly:

'Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours.'

My faith in deterrence in this case is not strong which inclines me to say 'Bomb Iran. Apologize afterwards' as Theo puts it. But there's a very good counter-argument (see this article, 'The Basis for Iran's Beligerence', by Shlomo Ben Ami, author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace) to this which causes me to think otherwise. I'm glad I'm not the one who has to make this call. I suppose that if I were, as much as I admire Ben-Ami, I'd have to err on the side of caution. Alas, bombs away.

Still, as Theo points out, '...there is no reason that a military strategy cannot be fashioned to try and reduce the fallout, in the UNSC and Iran, from bombing. The West could say: "sorry but we had no choice and we did warn you."' I think a part of that strategy is making it a little clearer to the Iranian people that in a proliferated world where the Ayatollahs have control of nuclear arms they’ve more or less declared Iran to be poste restante for nuclear terror--if ’somebody’ sets off a bomb in a city we’re quite likely to assume Iran’s culpability and therefore that the appropriate return address reads: Tehran via Abadan, Ahvaz, Bandar Abbas, Bushehr, Isfahan, Hamadan, Kerman, Mashhad, Rasht, Shiraz and Tabriz. In other words, no one should be more concerned about WMD getting to non-state actors than Iranians. A nuclera Iran is reallly not in their interest right now when itchy trigger fingers abound. That Iran’s current leaders do not always seem to see the need for caution and less millenarian rhetoric concerns me. It should REALLY concern them too.

Update: Here's David Aaronovitch in the Times. Great opener:

'THE NORTH KOREAN regime is apparently so bad that even George Galloway has never been there to offer his support. Or maybe that’s because it’s so broke.'