A controversial take on nuclear weapons is that they have the upside of preserving peace by making war so dangerous that states try harder to avoid it.
Many international relations analysts within the neo-realist school subscribe to this view. They point out that despite decades of tense relations between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, there was never a hot US-Soviet war.
A major reason might have been the fear that even a war fought with conventional weapons would escalate to the use of nuclear weapons, against which neither side could defend itself. Washington and Moscow backed opposing sides in proxy wars, but the specter of total annihilation caused both to behave with extraordinary caution toward each other’s military forces.
Is this interpretation of Cold War history relevant to today’s Northeast Asia? America’s most prominent neo-realist scholar, John Mearsheimer, applied the “nuclear peace” logic to the Korean Peninsula during his speech at the 2023 Korea Global Forum in Seoul on August 30.
“North Koreans with nuclear weapons is, I think, better than North Korea without nuclear weapons,” Mearsheimer argued. “I think the Korean Peninsula is more peaceful with a nuclear-armed North Korea than without.”
Mearsheimer said the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) acquired nuclear weapons to offset two threats to its security: First, its conventional military forces became weaker than those of South Korea, which left the DPRK vulnerable to invasion by its southern cousins.
Second, Pyongyang “has to worry greatly about the United States, [which] is obsessed with regime change, and … would like nothing more than to effect regime change in North Korea.”
Now that the DPRK is nuclear-armed, he said, “war on the Peninsula is extremely unlikely.” The US and the Republic of Korea (ROK) are deterred from attacking North Korea, while Pyongyang dares not use its nukes because of likely US nuclear retaliation.
As with the US and the USSR during the Cold War, Mearsheimer argues, nuclear arsenals possessed by both North Korea and the US-ROK alliance compel both sides to behave cautiously, bolstering peace and stability.
The notion that DPRK nukes cause peace on the Korean Peninsula, however, is flawed from several angles.
A key part of Mearsheimer’s argument is that Pyongyang acquired nuclear weapons because it believed South Korea, the United States or both would attack unless deterred by something more than the DPRK’s conventional forces.
That presumed belief is clearly wrong. The combined strength of US and ROK conventional forces has outmatched DPRK military strength at least since the 1990s. On top of this, the United States had total asymmetrical dominance in nuclear weapons over North Korea for six decades after the end of the Korean War. Yet Washington and Seoul chose not to invade or even attack the North.
A possible rebuttal is that even if there was never an actual danger of an unprovoked US/ROK attack, what matters is the Kim regime believed there is a danger. That the regime harbors such a belief is plausible.
US bombing destroyed much of North Korea during the Korean War; the American government threatened to use nuclear weapons before Pyongyang had them; and North Korean officials constantly allege – especially during US-ROK military exercises – that Washington is bent on going to war against the DPRK.
The DPRK’s actions, however, cast doubt on the notion that the Kim regime really fears attack from the US, as opposed to merely saying so for domestic propaganda purposes. Creating the image of a powerful and belligerent enemy gives the regime an excuse for economic underperformance at home and allows Kim to take undeserved credit for scaring off the expected enemy aggression.
In practice, for many years Pyongyang has felt so confident that its adversaries would not strike that it regularly carried out its own small-scale and sometimes lethal attacks against South Koreans.
These included placing a bomb that killed ROK officials visiting Rangoon, Burma/Myanmar, in 1983; the bombing of a Korean Airlines passenger jet in 1987, killing all 115 aboard; and the sinking of the ROK Navy vessel Cheonan in 2010, which killed 46 South Korean sailors.
There are two reasons why South Korea, as Pyongyang came to learn, has been loath to get into a military conflict with the DPRK.
First, neither the ROK government nor South Korean society is interested in conquering North Korea, even if they could do it at a low military cost. While they support the idea of reunification in principle, they are wary of the expense of rebuilding the North and the difficulty of managing a people who are inexperienced in democracy and ill-equipped to be productive in an advanced free market economy.
Second, Seoul, and by extension Washington, has long been deterred from taking military action by the likelihood that North Korean retaliation using conventional munitions delivered by artillery and rockets would devastate Seoul, where much of the ROK’s wealth and population are concentrated. In effect, the DPRK already had a sufficient capability to deter a serious US/ROK attack prior to acquiring nuclear weapons.
As for the US, rather than being “obsessed with regime change” in Pyongyang, Washington has expended considerable effort since the start of the long-running nuclear weapons crisis trying to assure the Kims that overthrowing them is not on the menu.
A common feature of official US efforts to subvert unfriendly foreign governments is pressure over human rights abuses, but the Trump and Biden administrations left the US government post of special envoy for North Korea human rights issues vacant from 2017 to 2023.
If the pre-nuclear DPRK government feared US attack, logically it would have viewed the period of time when it was known to be developing its nuclear weapons as the apogee of its vulnerability.
The US would have had the maximum incentive to launch a preventive strike or regime-ending invasion before the North gained nuclear symmetry with the United States and perhaps the capability to threaten the US homeland. If Pyongyang was afraid, it should have kept its nuclear aspirations as low-profile as possible.
Instead, however, the DPRK government taunted the United States, implying an eagerness to use nuclear weapons to kill Americans even years before this capability was operational. When former US secretary of defense William Perry led a delegation to North Korea in 1999, a military officer told him that DPRK nuclear weapons could hit Perry’s hometown of Palo Alto, California “the next day.”
North Korea released a video in 2013 depicting the nuclear destruction of New York. It gave Washington, DC, similar treatment with a 2016 video.
If, as Mearsheimer argues, fear of a US or South Korean invasion was the driving factor in Pyongyang’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, these weapons might increase peace by making North Korea feel secure. But if North Korea was not afraid of attack even before it got nukes, Mearsheimer’s argument is undercut.
The evidence suggests Pyongyang sought a nuclear capability for some other reason—perhaps as a bargaining chip, to bolster the regime’s prestige, or to force concessions from its adversaries.
Whatever the theoretical appeal of Mearsheimer’s argument, in empirical terms, it’s clear that North Korea’s getting nuclear weapons has increased, not decreased, tensions on the Peninsula. Washington and Seoul have proven they are content to ignore North Korea unless Pyongyang forces a crisis upon them.
The DPRK government’s demonstration of a nuclear capability, followed by its announced intentions to make that capability more threatening to its adversaries, has drawn reactions from the USA and the ROK, leading to counter-reactions from Pyongyang. The Peninsula is not “more peaceful.” Rather, it is seeing a negative spiral.
The DPRK going nuclear led the South Korean government to announce a risky, aggressive posture of targeting the North Korean leadership with missile strikes if a nuclear attack appears imminent.
Washington attempted to restore South Korean confidence in US extended deterrence by announcing that US “strategic assets” will regularly visit the ROK. In response, Pyongyang announced a law in late 2022 that allows for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against an adversary suspected of targeting the DPRK leadership.
Earlier this year, the DPRK defense minister said the deployment of nuclear-capable US platforms to South Korea could meet the requirements set out in the new law for Pyongyang to launch a nuclear strike. This is not what peace and stability look like.
Finally, Mearsheimer’s argument does not account for what international relations scholars call the stability-instability paradox: Nuclear-armed adversaries may be so confident that the other side is deterred from using its nuclear weapons that one or both is emboldened to indulge in conventional military adventurism.
If and when Pyongyang believes it has a sufficiently robust second-strike capability – meaning it could absorb a US nuclear attack and still hit back hard enough to cause unacceptable death and destruction on the US homeland – the Kim regime might use stronger and more frequent conventional military attacks against South Korea than before, because it will have negated America’s nuclear umbrella over the Peninsula.
This could enable a DPRK strategy that aims first to destroy South Korean confidence in US protection, then to break up the alliance and, finally, to use nuclear coercion to force Seoul to submit to Pyongyang’s political demands.
The Cold War notion of nuclear peace fares poorly in the case of the Korean Peninsula, where none of the three main actors necessarily behaves as a general theory would predict. Pyongyang’s deployment of nuclear weapons has made a bad situation worse.
Denny Roy is a senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.