Why did North Korea get nuclear weapons when different states with comparable nuclear ambitions like Iraq, Syria, and most just lately Iran didn’t? The usual reply factors to US coverage failures. In a latest International Affairs article, Victor Cha acknowledges that the US technique for addressing North Korea’s nuclear program has failed and requires a brand new framework aimed toward managing its nuclear risk. Equally, Joel Wit’s latest memoir laments the lack of successive US administrations to attain a diplomatic breakthrough with Pyongyang. Students like Nicholas Miller and Vipin Narang even counsel that the North Korean case defies conventional theories of nuclear proliferation, characterizing it as an outlier and calling for theoretical changes to account for it.
Nonetheless, essentially the most decisive variable in Pyongyang’s profitable nuclearization marketing campaign may very well lie elsewhere. The willingness of states going through a regional nuclearizing rival to soak up the prices of conflict higher explains the reason for Pyongyang’s proliferation success. Situating counterproliferation campaigns towards Iraq, Syria, and Iran alongside the one towards North Korea reveals that Israel’s willingness to make use of power and bear the following prices is what stopped three would-be proliferators, whereas Seoul’s refusal to take that very same threat is what allowed one to succeed.
South Korea: Battle as By no means an Choice
Launching a preemptive strike towards North Korea right now is hardly thinkable as it’ll nearly definitely set off a nuclear response from Pyongyang, which now possesses a number of nuclear weapons in storage and a number of varieties and ranges of supply methods. The report reveals, nonetheless, that even when North Korea’s nuclear program was nonetheless in its infancy, army motion was by no means an possibility for South Korea. For the three South Korean presidents who presided over a pre-nuclear North Korea—Kim Younger-sam, Kim Dae-jung, and Roh Moo-hyun—utilizing army power to get rid of Pyongyang’s nuclear risk was by no means on the menu of counterproliferation measures.
Kim Younger-sam, who assumed workplace in 1992, was the primary president to have the choice to militarily take away North Korea’s nuclear risk with US assist. North Korea joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985 below Soviet stress however delayed IAEA inspections for a few years. When inspectors lastly gained entry in 1992, they found proof of undeclared plutonium reprocessing on the Yongbyon Scientific Nuclear Analysis Middle and demanded entry to suspicious nuclear websites. Pyongyang denied entry and introduced its withdrawal from the NPT, thereby triggering the primary nuclear disaster, which peaked in June 1994, when Kim realized of the US plan to strike North Korea’s nuclear services at Yongbyon. As Kim places it in his memoir, the Peninsula was on “the brink of conflict,” and he got down to forestall it.
Kim Younger-sam instantly summoned James Laney, US Ambassador to Seoul, to the Blue Home and delivered a passionate plea to cease the US army plan towards North Korea’s nuclear services. He then conveyed equally passionate and defiant messages to US President Invoice Clinton. Kim insisted that conflict with the North would kill numerous folks and collapse the Korean financial system. He protested that conflict may by no means occur; in any other case, he “can be committing a sin earlier than historical past and the Korean folks.”
Curiously, nonetheless, the exact same Kim Younger-sam who proudly recounts efficiently convincing Clinton to name off the airstrikes on the final second, expressed remorse for doing so 14 years later. In response to a Wikileaks doc, Kim instructed a US diplomat in a personal dialog that (at the moment) a army strike rendering the Peninsula “nuclear-free” would have left everybody higher off. But, nonetheless remorseful he might have felt after the actual fact, Kim confirmed no willingness to tolerate the potential prices of conflict with North Korea when he had the worldwide legitimacy and assist to take action.
The Agreed Framework, signed between US and North Korea in October 1994, resolved the primary North Korea nuclear disaster however didn’t essentially take away its nuclear risk. The settlement solely handled North Korea’s plutonium manufacturing program and was efficient in curbing these capabilities during its implementation. Nonetheless, via the late Nineteen Nineties, North Korea secretly acquired centrifuge know-how via the A.Q. Khan community, laying the groundwork for a parallel uranium enrichment program.
Kim Dae-jung, who succeeded Kim Younger-sam in 1998, was much more dedicated to the concept of non-military measures in resolving North Korea’s nuclear points. He was the architect of what’s often known as the “sunshine coverage,” an strategy designed to incentivize Pyongyang to forgo additional nuclear improvement via dialogue, trust-building, and financial cooperation. As he additionally notes in his memoir, conflict with North Korea as a coverage choice to take away its nuclear risk was by no means on the desk. For him, wars make folks lose their dignity and take too many harmless lives. He noticed it as his life mission to forestall conflict and produce concerning the peaceable reunification of the Peninsula. Kim Dae-jung would have emphatically opposed any strike plan even when the proper window had arisen.
The second nuclear disaster broke out in October 2002 when Washington confronted Pyongyang with proof of its secret uranium enrichment program. The Agreed Framework collapsed, the 5MWe reactor at Yongbyon was restarted, and North Korea withdrew from the NPT solely in 2003. Roh Moo-hyun, who succeeded Kim Dae-jung in February 2003, inherited each the disaster and his predecessor’s framework for managing it. He, too, was categorically against the usage of power in coping with Pyongyang’s nuclear risk. He writes in his posthumously printed memoir that when the USA introduced up the choice of surgical strikes towards North Korea’s nuclear services, he managed to dissuade the Individuals from doing so. Roh believed that eradicating the army possibility from the desk was essential to earn North Korea’s belief and infuse predictability into the connection. He assured the South Korean people who as long as he was president, there can be no army motion towards North Korea.
Within the early 2000s, makes an attempt to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions shifted to multilateral talks, performed via the Six Celebration course of involving the US, South Korea, North Korea, China, Russia and Japan. Nonetheless, this course of was additionally fraught with political and bureaucratic situations that restricted its capacity to maintain implementation of assorted commitments. In 2006, Pyongyang performed its first nuclear check, severely narrowing the window of alternative to cease North Korea’s nuclear path.
Israel: Battle as All the time an Choice
Israel gives the mirror picture. The 2 states share a structural place: US allies going through a regional proliferating rival. But, they diverge sharply on what they’ve been keen to soak up to maintain that rival from crossing the nuclear threshold. The place Seoul handled any strike on the North as a conflict it was obligated to keep away from, Jerusalem has persistently handled a conflict to maintain an adversary from going nuclear as one it couldn’t afford to depart un-waged. Seoul’s restraint was its personal selection. Against this, Israel, from Start to Olmert to Netanyahu, has been keen to make use of power, and to soak up the prices of the conflict which may comply with, even when these prices had been estimated to be excessive.
Israel’s excessive diploma of cost-tolerance has roots deeper than is often appreciated. The Start Doctrine, articulated after the 1981 strike on Osirak, is greater than a overseas coverage posture. It sits towards the backdrop of the Holocaust narrative: that the state should do no matter it may to forestall an existential hazard to the Jewish folks and that it should at all times preserve look ahead to a gathering risk so the destiny of the Jews of Europe is rarely repeated. That conviction is what makes Israel keen, many times, to make use of power towards a future hazard, and to pay the worth now moderately than later. It additionally leads Israelis to view any proliferating actor within the area within the darkest attainable mild.
The Start Doctrine additionally rests on a well-liked mandate: army motion towards Iran’s nuclear program instructions broad assist amongst Israelis. Start’s strike on Osirak and Olmert’s on Deir ez-Zor in 2007 had drawn home criticism on the time, nevertheless it didn’t dissuade future Israeli leaders from utilizing power towards different regional proliferating actors. That mandate is what enabled Netanyahu in 2025 and 2026 to launch operations towards Iran.
Israel’s resolve to forestall the nuclear armament of its regional rivals has held regular whilst the worth of a army strike rose. In 1981, the price that nervous Start at Osirak was not Iraqi retaliation however the security of the pilots and the danger to the still-fresh peace with Egypt. By 2007, at Deir ez-Zor, Israel feared Syrian retaliation and labored to keep away from it by giving Assad an off-ramp via silence and no declare of credit score. By 2025, after the Hamas assaults of October 7, 2023, Israel’s willingness to make use of power on the whole has grown, particularly for stopping a proliferating adversary rose. On the eve of the primary Iran marketing campaign, Israeli assessments had been far darker than what got here to move, projecting heavy civilian casualties and in flip, existential rhetoric. Israel struck anyway.
The lesson from October 7 for Israel was that intelligence failure plus restraint was catastrophic, and that threats allowed to mature would ultimately strike again, as they did on that morning. Furthermore, the tolerance for prices rose. Excessive casualties, diplomatic isolation, allied criticism, and stress on funding and commerce—components that might sometimes deter a small state from participating in a preventive conflict—now not carried the identical weight they did earlier than October 7. Extra importantly, a nuclear Iran has been firmly established in Israeli society as the last word risk, one which should be eliminated at any price. Certainly, the prices of a army counterproliferation marketing campaign towards Iran weren’t theoretical. Israel absorbed retaliatory missile and drone barrages, accepted months of financial disruption, and walked right into a regional conflict footing and not using a clear exit. Seoul has by no means needed to ask its public to soak up something shut.
The variations within the two nations’ political resolve to threat a conflict however, it should nonetheless be acknowledged that the 2 nations function in numerous strategic and historic contexts. Geography is the obvious. Israel’s relative distance from its nuclearizing adversaries makes the political choice to launch a preventive strike comparatively simpler to take. South Korea and North Korea, against this, are separated by a four-kilometer-wide demilitarized zone; practically all of South Korea lies inside vary of North Korea’s artillery and short-range missiles. This proximity shapes how South Korean leaders weigh the danger of any strike on the North. Syria, it’s true, additionally shares a border with Israel, however the complete rationale behind the Deir ez-Zor operation was to maintain the strike covert and keep away from triggering the form of retaliation that proximity makes attainable.
Historic context diverges simply as sharply. For Korean leaders, conflict evokes the devastation of the Korean Battle, 1950-1953: a Peninsula lowered to rubble, households divided, and a poverty that took a long time to beat. For Israeli leaders, conflict is sure up with the nation’s founding and survival — its 1948 Battle and those that adopted are remembered as crucial and formative acts of the state’s existence. Lastly, North Korea has not been a clear-cut strategic rival to South Korea the identical means Iraq, Syria, and Iran have been to Israel; it represented, and continues to characterize, an ambiguous entity with which South Korea is in battle however in the end anticipated to unite. Though assist for unification has declined lately, roughly half of the South Korean inhabitants nonetheless perceives it as crucial, and a majority proceed to favor cooperation with the North. That sentiment, and the optimism about eventual reunification, was even stronger within the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s, following the tip of the Chilly Battle. Israel by no means needed to navigate that dilemma.
But, whereas these contextual components form how leaders understand threat and even the character of a rival, they don’t predetermine how they make selections in vital choice making moments. As Kim Younger-sam’s regretful confession illustrates, he may have gathered the resolve to launch a preventive strike towards North Korea’s nuclear services however selected to not. This underscores that political willingness to soak up the speedy brunt of conflict, greater than context alone, can nonetheless matter enormously in profitable counterproliferation campaigns towards regional nuclearizing rivals.
A Contingent Doctrine
This asymmetry invitations a reframing of Washington’s function in a counterproliferation marketing campaign. Washington’s function mattered, however Israel’s has been bigger than standard knowledge tends to imagine. Israel’s lively army posture, typically wrapped in existential rhetoric, has been unambiguous. The decisive variable was not US readiness to interact in kinetic motion; it was whether or not Israel, as a state going through a regional nuclearizing rival, was keen to soak up what the conflict would price. Within the North Korean case, South Korea didn’t see the prices of conflict as a viable possibility.
The doctrine on show, nonetheless, is a contingent one. Its success depends upon three issues that no front-line state can totally manufacture by itself: a public willingness to underwrite a kinetic operation towards a proliferator; an alliance keen to maintain weapons flowing and supply diplomatic cowl all through the counterproliferation marketing campaign; and intelligence sharp sufficient to see, in time, when the opposite actor is breaking for a bomb. Whether or not Israel’s intervention has stored Iran from the bomb or solely delayed it stays to be seen, however Israel’s present marketing campaign towards Iran has all three related components. The identical can’t be stated for the Korean case.
