Explaining North Korea's Nuclear Ambitions: Power and Position on the Korean Peninsula

ABSTRACT

The USA has long called for the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation of North Korea. But is this a realistic policy option? In order to address this question, a broader question needs to be answered: What are the primary drivers of North Korea’s interest in nuclear weapons? Most answers to this question take one of two basic positions. ‘Doves’, on the one hand, see North Korea developing nuclear weapons because of the threatening foreign policies of the USA and South Korea. ‘Hawks’, on the other hand, see North Korean nuclear development as driven by factors internal to the North Korean regime, inherent in its personality. The author examines these two arguments against the evidence and finds them both wanting. In contrast, he puts forth an alternative argument focused on the power of the global hegemon, the USA, and its position on the Korean Peninsula. This power and positional alternative is shown to be better reflected in the evidence presented.

KEYWORDS:

• East Asia
• North Korea
• nuclear proliferation
• US foreign policy

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his gratitude to Victor D. Cha, Yasuhiro Izumikawa, Barbra Kim, Tongfi Kim, Jiyoung Ko, Jennifer Lind, Nuno P. Monteiro and the two anonymous referees for their insightful and constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article. This article has also benefitted greatly from a presentation at the Yale University International Relations Student Workshop and the 2016 International Studies Association meeting.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nicholas D. Anderson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Yale University.

Notes

1 By ‘structural’ I mean rooted in the distribution of relative material capabilities between states and their geographical or topographical surroundings, rather than their domestic regime type, intentions or specific behaviours (see Waltz 2010, 40, 79–101).

2 On levels of analysis in international relations, see Singer (1961) and Waltz (2001).

3 The events on which Figure 1 is based can be found in Davenport (2017), FAS (n.d.) and NTI (2012).

4 On the engagement efforts of various US presidents, see Cha (2012, 276–297).

5 Data from the Ministry of Unification (MoU n.d. a, b). The dashed line here and in all following figures indicates the year of nuclear acquisition.

6 Inter-Korean trade data from the Korean International Trade Association (KITA 2017).

7 Aid data from the World Food Programme (WFP 2017).

8 Although it is worth noting that they do frequently argue for the use of coercive pressure to attempt to wean the North away from its nuclear ambitions, indicating that they are not entirely pessimistic.

9 For detailed data on all nuclear and missile tests, see CSIS (2017).

10 The data was collected by the author. The data set includes 140 unique observations of North Korean militarised provocations between 1995 and 2016. Examples of militarised provocations included in the data are territorial incursions on land, air or sea; exchanges of fire across the demilitarised zone or maritime boundaries; and missile tests. Nuclear tests are not included in Figure 5. The data is available as online supplementary material accompanying this article.

11 This interpretation is in line with arguments that realist scholars have long made about the effects of nuclear weapons (see Sagan and Waltz 2012).

12 As Paul Holland (1986, 959) famously put it, there can be ‘no causation without manipulation’.

13 I thank Terence Roehrig for this point.

14 Although its chances of success have become vanishingly small (see Kang 2003; O’Hanlon 1998).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.