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North Korea

The Unacceptability of Vulnerability to North Korea’s Nuclear Arsenal

<p>People walk in front of a monitor showing news of North Korea&#8217;s fresh threat in Tokyo, Japan, August 10, 2017.</p>
People walk in front of a monitor showing news of North Korea’s fresh threat in Tokyo, Japan, August 10, 2017. Reuters/Toru Hanai

By experts and staff

Published
  • Scott A. Snyder
    Senior Fellow for Korea Studies and Director of the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy

North Korea under Kim Jong Un has become a parasite that increasingly threatens both the Korean Peninsula and the world. Kim’s nuclear weapons program has given him hope that time is on his side, and incrementalism at the U.N. Security Council has fed that hope. The United States needs to buy more time against North Korea’s nuclearization efforts and use it effectively to halt and eventually reverse North Korea’s current course. But Kim’s effort to export his own sense of vulnerability to the United States will not succeed and will result in his own demise. How that process plays out remains important because it will determine the distribution of costs across the region that will in turn affect the shape of a new security order in northeast Asia.

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