Roy, Denny

Abstract
Pyongyang will likely achieve a credible nuclear-ICBM capability in the next few years. This development, though frightening and unwelcome, will not be a game-changer.
The crisis over North Korea’s nuclear-weapons programme, now stretching into a third decade, is worsening. There seems little chance that North Korea will give up its arsenal absent a drastic change in circumstances. Pyongyang has repeatedly said its status as a nuclear-weapons state is permanent, even writing this into its constitution in 2012. In the minds of the North Korean people, elevating the country into the nuclear-weapons club is perhaps the greatest tangible accomplishment of the late Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il (father of current leader Kim Jong-un), as economic development foundered during his tenure. Hopes that Pyongyang might have considered its nuclear-weapons programme as a bargaining chip to be traded away for improved relations with its adversaries have largely faded.
Instead, Pyongyang is working toward producing a reliable, nucleararmed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could threaten the US homeland. North Korean technicians are making steady progress. A test of the Taepodong-2 rocket, which theoretically has the range to reach parts of the United States, failed in 2006, but a civilian variant of the missile successfully carried a payload into space in 2012. Some US intelligence analysts think North Korea is already able to make a nuclear weapon small enough to fit in the nose cone of a ballistic missile. Admiral William Gortney, the commander of US forces responsible for defending North America, said in 2016, ‘it’s the prudent decision on my part to assume that [North Korea] has the capability to … miniaturize a nuclear weapon and put it on an ICBM’ that can reach ‘all of the states of the United States and Canada’. In March 2016 an anonymous South Korean official told Reuters that the North can now mount a nuclear warhead on intermediate-range missiles that can reach all of South Korea and parts of Japan.
The general populations in the countries with which North Korea has poor relations can be expected to react strongly to this development. The US mass media have already begun discussing the idea of North Korea being able to strike the US homeland with a nuclear weapon. If asked to describe the North Korean government as they know it, most Americans would say two things. The first is that the government is irrational (or unstable, crazy or unpredictable). The second is that the country is obsessively hostile to the United States. Indeed, Pyongyang has cultivated this view, apparently anxious for Americans to view North Korean nuclear weapons as a threat to the United States. The messaging is typically unsubtle. In 2013, the North Korean government distributed a video depicting the destruction of Manhattan by a North Korean nuclear missile. Another North Koreamade video released in 2016 featured a nuclear explosion in Washington DC. As Americans come to believe that North Korea can strike their homeland, there will be increased pressure from the US public for Washington to address the new danger. Neglecting North Korea was relatively easy for Americans when it threatened only US allies South Korea and Japan, but it will not be so if Pyongyang can turn Los Angeles into a ‘sea of fire’.
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