Is
the North Korean nuclear crisis slowly eroding the so-called nuclear taboo?
By Franz-Stefan Gady
| The Diplomat
This
summer’s nuclear showdown between the United States and North Korea, largely
manufactured by the bravado and bluster of the President of the United States,
seemed to conclude “not with a bang but with a whimper,” until yesterday’s missile test overflying Japan. As a result, the
underlying question, how to best prevent a U.S.-North Korean nuclear war, as
Pyongyang continues to push for “full spectrum deterrence,” endures.
Among
other things, this summer’s crisis highlights the belief held by some U.S.
policymakers that an alleged irrational actor such as North Korea cannot be
deterred from launching its nuclear missiles by threatening nuclear
retaliation. For example, U.S. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster in an
interview this month said that “classical deterrence theory” does not apply to
North Korea. At the same time, U.S. officials (including U.S.
President Donald Trump) have repeatedly floated the idea of preemptive military strikes against North Korean
missile sites as an ostensible last ditch effort to deter Pyongyang.
Given
that North Korea has time and again made it clear that it would immediately
counter any conventional attack with overwhelming force including nuclear
weapons (Vipin Narang has coined this posture “Asymmetric Escalation”), U.S. preemptive military strikes
would almost certainly trigger a North Korean nuclear response. North Korea has
expanded its nuclear arsenal to up to 30 weapons. Once such a response occurs, the
United States might retaliate in kind and launch nuclear missiles. The
result would be the end of a powerful moral taboo about the use of nuclear
weapons. Indeed, once the spell is broken after the first nuclear bomb has
exploded, the likelihood of nuclear war in other parts of the world will have
increased markedly.
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Underlying
the so-called nuclear taboo, a burgeoning international norm against the use of
nuclear weapons, is that nuclear deterrence — a function of a country’s nuclear
capabilities, doctrine, and command and control procedures for launching
nuclear weapons — alone has not prevented nuclear war since 1945, but rather a
gradual international consensus that prohibits states from ever using the
“Bomb.” This hypothesis is backed up by the work of several scholars. Nina
Tannenwald in an influential paper (followed by a book), argues:
A
normative prohibition on nuclear use has developed in the global system, which,
although not (yet) a fully robust norm, has stigmatized nuclear weapons as
unacceptable weapons of mass destruction (…) Ultimately, in delegitimizing
nuclear weapons, the nuclear taboo has constrained the practice of self-help in
the international system. States are not free to resort to nuclear weapons
without incurring moral opprobrium or political costs. National leaders are
forced to seek alternative technologies for use in war or defense or else risk
being classified as outside the bounds of ‘civilized’ international society.
