[What is playing out, said Robert Litwak of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who tracks this potentially deadly interplay, is “the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.” But the slow-motion part appears to be speeding up, as President Trump and his aides have made it clear that the United States will no longer tolerate the incremental advances that have moved Mr. Kim so close to his goals.]
By David E. Sanger and William J. Broad
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At a recent military
parade, North Korea displayed several missiles at a time of
heightened tensions with
the United States. Here's a closer look at what some
of them are designed to
do. By MARK SCHEFFLER and DAPHNE
RUSTOW on Publish Date April 16, 2017. Photo by Wong
Maye-E/Associated Press.
Watch in Times Video »
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WASHINGTON
— All the elements of the
North Korean nuclear crisis — the relentless drive by Kim Jong-un to assemble
an arsenal, the propaganda and deception swirling around his progress, the
hints of a covert war by the United States to undermine the effort, rather than
be forced into open confrontation — were on vivid display this weekend.
There was the parade in Pyongyang’s main
square, with wave after wave of missiles atop mobile launchers, intended to
convey a sense that Mr. Kim’s program is unstoppable. Then came another embarrassing
setback, a missile test that failed seconds after liftoff, the same pattern
seen in a surprising number of launches since President Barack Obama ordered
stepped-up cyber- and electronic-warfare attacks in early 2014. Finally, there
was the test that did not happen, at least yet — a sixth nuclear explosion. It
is primed and ready to go, satellite images show.
What is playing out, said Robert Litwak of
the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who tracks this
potentially deadly interplay, is “the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.” But
the slow-motion part appears to be speeding up, as President Trump and his
aides have made it clear that the United States will no longer tolerate the
incremental advances that have moved Mr. Kim so close to his goals.
Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson has said
repeatedly that “our policy of strategic patience has ended,” hardening the
American position as Mr. Kim makes steady progress toward two primary goals:
shrinking a nuclear weapon to a size that can fit atop a long-range missile,
and developing a hydrogen bomb, with up to a thousand times the power than the
Hiroshima-style weapons he has built so far.
While all historical analogies are
necessarily imprecise — for starters, President John F. Kennedy dealt with the
Soviets and Fidel Castro in a perilous 13 days in 1962, while the roots of the
Korean crisis go back a quarter-century — one parallel shines through. When
national ambitions, personal ego and deadly weapons are all in the mix, the
opportunities for miscalculation are many.
So far, Mr. Trump has played his hand —
militarily, at least — as cautiously as his predecessors: A series of Situation
Room meetings has come to the predictable conclusion that while the United
States can be more aggressive, it should stop just short of confronting the
North so frontally that it risks rekindling the Korean War, nearly 64 years
after it came to an uneasy armistice.
Still, the current standoff has grown only
more volatile. It pits a new president’s vow never to allow North Korea to put
American cities at risk — “It won’t happen!” he said on Twitter on Jan. 2 —
against a young, insecure North Korean leader who sees that capability as his
only guarantee of survival.
Mr. Trump is clearly new to this kind of
dynamic, as he implicitly acknowledged when he volunteered that Xi Jinping,
China’s president, had given him what amounted to a compressed seminar in
Chinese-North Korean relations. He emerged surprised that Beijing did not have
the kind of absolute control over its impoverished neighbor that he insisted it
did last year.
“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized
it’s not so easy,” he said. “It’s not what you would think.”
Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Lt.
Gen. H. R. McMaster, gave voice to the difficult balancing act on North Korea
on Sunday. General McMaster, himself a military historian, said on ABC’s “This
Week” that while the president had not ruled out any option, it was time for
the United States “to take action, short of armed conflict, so we can avoid the
worst” in dealing with “this unpredictable regime.” Translation: Pre-emptive
strikes are off the table, at least for now.
The fact that Mr. Kim did not conduct a
nuclear test over the weekend, timed to the anniversary of the birth of his
grandfather, the founder of the country and its nuclear program, may indicate
that Mr. Xi has given him pause. In the White House’s telling, Mr. Xi is
responding to pressure by Mr. Trump to threaten a cutoff of the North’s
financial links and energy supplies — its twin lifelines as a state.
“Why would I call China a currency
manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem?” Mr.
Trump asked in a Twitter post on Sunday morning, making it clear that
everything, including the trade issues he vowed to solve as a candidate, could be
a bargaining chip when it comes to defanging the North.
The North is trying to create the sense that
it is too late for any such defanging — that it has reached a tipping point in
its nuclear push. That is why Mr. Kim stood for hours as so many missiles
rolled by on Saturday, carried on portable launch vehicles that can be hidden
in hundreds of tunnels bored into North Korean mountains.
For all the talk of an eventual
intercontinental missile that can reach the United States, one of the stars of
the show was a missile of lesser range — the Pukguksong-2, also known as the
KN-15. It is a solid-fuel rocket that can be launched in minutes, unlike
liquid-fueled missiles, which take hours of preparation. That means they are
far less vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike from an American missile launched
from a base in Japan or from a carrier strike group like the one Mr. Trump has
put off the Korean coast.
The KN-15 was successfully tested in
February. On Saturday, it was paraded in public for the first time, like a
conquering hero fresh from a moon landing.
“The big takeaway is that they’re taking this
seriously,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a North Korea specialist at the Middlebury
Institute for International Studies at Monterey, in California. “They’re trying
to develop operational systems that might actually survive on the ground,”
perhaps even enduring blows meant to leave them crippled or destroyed.
But Mr. Kim’s otherwise triumphant day took a
bad turn when the missile test failed. North Korea used to be pretty successful
at launching missiles, so much so that its missiles were sold around the world.
Then its launches started failing, suggesting the presence of a hidden
Washington hand.
Its big setbacks have revolved around the
most threatening missile it has so far flight-tested, known as the Musudan.
Last year, it had a failure rate of 88 percent. Mr. Kim was reported to have
ordered an investigation into the possibility of foreign sabotage, and the
missile has remained unseen since.
Asked on Fox News on Sunday whether the United
States had played any role in the latest missile failure, K. T. McFarland,
General McMaster’s departing deputy, said, “You know we can’t talk about that.”
Most likely, no one knows for sure, but the ambiguity feeds North Korea’s
paranoia, intelligence experts say.
But such programs buy time; they are not
solutions. Equally worrisome to Washington officials and private analysts is
the North’s steady progress over a decade in developing nuclear warheads that
are small enough to fit atop long-range missiles. By definition, the atomic
work appears to be far less open to prying eyes and foreign sabotage. The
explosive nuclear tests take place in tunnels dug deep beneath a rugged
mountain.
“They’ve done five tests in 10 years,” said
Siegfried S. Hecker, a Stanford professor who once directed the Los Alamos
weapons laboratory in New Mexico, a birthplace of the atomic bomb. “You can
learn a lot in that time.”
Tempting as the analogies to Cuba may be, Mr.
Kim is probably thinking of another nuclear negotiation — with Libya, in 2003.
Its leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, agreed to give up his nascent nuclear
program in return for promises from the West of economic integration and
acceptance. It never really happened, and as soon as Libya’s populace turned
against the dictator during the Arab Spring, the United States and its European
and Arab allies drove him from power. Ultimately, he was pulled out of a ditch
and shot.
Periodically, the North Koreans write about
that experience, noting what a sap Colonel Qaddafi was to give up the nuclear
program that might have saved him. Mr. Kim, it appears, is not planning to make
the same mistake.
David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and
William J. Broad from New York.