North Korea does not, at the moment, have a demonstrated capability to put a nuclear weapon on the U.S. homeland. Dan Pinkston noted that, in the Korean phrase for "U.S. Mainland Strike Plan," the word "plan" carries an aspirational quality. I believe North Korea is moving toward an operational nuclear capability, but the details are obscure. North Korea may be deploying the road-mobile KN-08 missile that it paraded through Kim Il Sung square last spring, or may be sitting on either a three-stage Unha missile for military purposes or something even bigger. I am not persuaded that North Korea must flight-test an ICBM before it deploys one, but not doing flight testing does undermine the credibility of the missile threat. It's not time to panic just yet.
But it is important to take these threats seriously, if only to discern the signal in the cacophony of threats and bluster. The current bellicosity is not normal. Although North Korea has long traded in insults and hyperbole, this seems different to me. The threats and assertions that have followed the collapse of the Leap Day Deal in early 2012 have been very personal. While we have largely focused on the U.S.-DPRK dynamic, the relationship between North and South Korea is equally important. The two countries have spent the past year exchanging threats to kill each other's leadership, something that is not a purely idle threat.
Last spring, South Korea announced it was developing new ballistic and cruise missiles, noting that the latter could "fly through Kim Jong Un's window." The North Koreans took that statement very, very badly. They interpreted it as a very deliberate threat to decapitate the North Korean leadership and responded with a very vitriolic campaign depicting Lee Myung Bak as a dead rat. Clearly, the South Koreans had found a sensitive spot, which they pushed again a few weeks ago when they released more footage of ballistic and cruise missiles, noting again that window-sized targets were in play. The North Koreans have issued a series of statements that make very clear how serious they take threats to decapitate the North Korean government.
The current situation, then, strikes me as particularly dangerous. The North Koreans have grown used to provoking the South Koreans with relative impunity. 2010 was a very rough year, with the sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island. The South Koreans are clearly tired of taking a beating at the hands of the North Koreans, although I worry that all this talk of precision strikes is an escapist fantasy. North Korea could easily push South Korea too far, leading the South Koreans to dramatically escalate the situation in a way that would be dangerous and unpredictable. Taking a shot at Kim Jong Un and the rest of the leadership might sound like a good idea over coffee and donuts during a simulation -- but South Korea better not miss in real life.
I suspect that North Korea's sudden focus on targeting the United States reflects this. It serves as a warning that the United States has a stake in restraining South Korea. As the North and South exchange increasingly bellicose threats about targeting the other's leadership, the South Koreans have given every indication they might do something unpredictable -- apparently in the hope of deterring another provocation. Pyongyang may well believe that the United States could constrain South Korea's response. If so, that message isn't getting through. The United States and South Korea have discussed expanding the latitude of South Korean units to respond to local provocations, something I like to think of as the threat that leaves everything to chance. (That's a Schelling joke, by the way.)
The North Koreans, too, have signaled that they have delegated the "final authority" to retaliate against a provocation. Both sides are acting like teenagers in a game of chicken, claiming to have thrown the steering wheels out of their cars.
How we get through this depends in no small part on two relatively inexperienced leaders.
South Korea has a new president, Madam Park Geun-hye, who is understandably reluctant to set a precedent of taking North Korea's abuse. (The first draft did not say "abuse.") The fact that her mother was killed in a 1974 North Korean assassination attempt on her father adds an interesting complication to the situation.
Another complication is that the North Koreans, for their part, have the sort of views about a woman in authority that would make Archie Bunker uncomfortable. North Korea has unleashed a barrage of sexist propaganda, starting with references to a "venomous swish of a skirt." (They are kind of pigs.) That brings us to our other new leader: Kim Jong Un, whom the vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff derisively called a "young lad." Whether a young and untested North Korean leader might be backed into stupid decisions out of some sexist worry about being pushed around by a South Korean woman is an unpleasant possibility. (Maybe we can send Kim some Thatcher DVDs or a arrange a trip to the Falklands.)
All of this is to say that the situation is extremely volatile. And we sometimes forget that, for all our confidence in the stability of deterrence, the leaders making decisions in the middle of all this are human beings with their own faults and frailties.
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