By George Will
Wednesday, September 06, 2017
The U.S. Air Force “sniffer plane” was collecting air
samples off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula on September 3, 1949, when it gathered
evidence of radioactivity, confirming that the war-shattered Soviet Union had
tested a nuclear device. The Soviets’ August 29, 1949, test had come faster
than expected.
Dating from the detonation at Alamogordo, N.M., on July
16, 1945, the basic science of nuclear explosions is more than 72 years old —
three years older than the North Korean nation. Ballistic-missile technology is
more than 60 years old. The problems of miniaturizing warheads for mounting on
missiles, and of ensuring the warheads’ survival en route to targets, are not
sufficient to stymie a nation — consider Pakistan, whose annual per capita
income is less than $2,000 — that is determined to have a nuclear arsenal.
North Korea has one and is developing ICBMs faster than
expected and with ostentatious indifference to U.S. proclamations. On January
2, President-elect Donald Trump scampered up the rhetorical escalation ladder,
unlimbering his heavy artillery — an exclamation point — to tweet about North
Korea’s promised ICBM test: “It won’t happen!” It did. North Korea’s most audacious
act, firing a missile over Japan, came seven days after Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson praised North Korea’s “restraint.”
Pyongyang’s “signaling” does not involve abstruse
semiotics: It wants a nuclear arsenal, and as The Economist magazine says, the world’s unpalatable options are
the improbable (productive negotiations), the feeble (more sanctions), and the
terrifying (military pre-emption). Concerning the latter, there is no bright
line, but there is a distinction to be drawn, however imprecisely, between
pre-emptive war and preventive war. The former constitutes self-defense in
response to a clear and present danger — repelling an act of aggression
presumed with reasonable certainty to be imminent. The latter is an act of
anticipation — and, to be candid, of aggression — to forestall the emergence of
a clear and present danger.
When Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury
like the world has never seen,” was he threatening to cross the nuclear-weapons
threshold? This has been contemplated before regarding North Korea. Former
general Douglas MacArthur, who had been fired by President Harry Truman for
insubordination, handed President-elect Dwight Eisenhower a memorandum on how
“to clear North Korea of enemy forces”: “This could be accomplished through the
atomic bombing of enemy military concentrations and installations in North
Korea and the sowing of fields of suitable radio-active materials, the
by-product of atomic manufacture, to close major lines of enemy supply and
communication.”
MacArthur badly misjudged Eisenhower, whose biographer
Jean Edward Smith says that during the Potsdam Conference (July 17–August 2,
1945), when Eisenhower was told of the Alamogordo test — his first knowledge of
the new weapon — “he was appalled” and “was the only one at Potsdam who opposed
using the bomb.” Smith says:
As president, Eisenhower would
twice be presented with recommendations from his National Security Council and
the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the bomb be used; first, in Vietnam to protect
the French at Dien Bien Phu, then against China at the time of the Formosa
Strait crisis. Both times Eisenhower rejected the recommendations. As a former
supreme commander, Eisenhower had the confidence to do so, where other
presidents might not have. And by rejecting the use of the bomb, there is no
question that Eisenhower raised the threshold at which atomic weaponry could be
employed — a legacy we continue to enjoy.
But for how long? The non-proliferation regime has been
remarkably successful. During the 1960 presidential campaign, John Kennedy
cited “indications” that by 1964 there would be “ten, 15, or 20″ nuclear
powers. As president, he said that by 1975 there might be 20. Now, however,
North Korea, the ninth, might be joined by Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan,
among others, unless U.S. leadership produces, regarding North Korea, conspicuously
credible deterrence. The reservoir of presidential credibility is not brimful.
On August 1, Senator Lindsey Graham said that Trump had
told him that “there will be a war with North Korea” if it continues to develop
ICBMs capable of reaching the United States. “We’ll see,” said Trump on Sunday,
responding to this shouted question: “Will you attack North Korea?” You?
Are Congress’s constitutional powers regarding war so
atrophied that it supinely hopes for mere post facto notification? Ten months
after November 8, that day’s costs, until now largely aesthetic, are suddenly,
although not altogether unpredictably, more serious than were perhaps
contemplated by his 62,984,825 voters.
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