Crossing the Red Line

 

Crossing the Red Line

 

By Lee Hyon-soo

 

                                                    

North Korea’s nuclear program is a challenge to the global nuclear nonproliferation regime. So the international community condemns North Korea and imposes sanctions aimed at inducing this rogue state to abandon its nuclear program. 

 

Nuclear arsenals are supposedly for deterrence purposes. But North Korean leaders surprised us by indicating publicly that they may launch nuclear weapons against not only South Korea but also the United States, if they so choose. From the U.S. perspective, for North Korea to carry out an attack on the United States would be to cross the red line. If North Korean leaders think they can get away with crossing the red line, they obviously do not know what they are up against. I would like to cite two incidents which demonstrate how the United States responded in the past when its security was violated.

 

The first incident took place in 1941. I am talking about Japan’s ill-advised decision to bomb Pearl Harbor. In order to build what it called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan planned to seize Southeast Asia to procure iron, oil, rubber, rice and other raw materials and transport them to Japan. And it was necessary to protect the Japanese flank from any threat of U.S. naval action in the Southwest Pacific. So Japan decided to smash the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. The rationale for the preemptive strike was that it would remove the United States from all possibility of interference and further hostilities altogether.

 

It was a gross miscalculation on the part of Japan. Many historians believe that Japanese attack on Dutch, British or French colonies in Asia may not have brought the United States into the war because Americans were strongly isolationist at the time. But the Japanese attack on their own territory united the Americans and motivated the whole nation for war. Japan gave its opponent the one blow necessary to bring it into determined belligerency. We all know how the Pacific War ended.

 

The second incident took place in 2001. There were a series of coordinated terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda on the United States on the morning of September 11, 2001. The attacks killed almost 3,000 people and injured over 6,000 others and caused about $10 billion in property and infrastructure damage. The United States responded by invading Afghanistan to dispose of the Taliban which had harbored al-Qaeda. Also, after a 10-year manhunt, American special forces located and killed Osama bin Laden, who had orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, in Pakistan in May 2011.  

 

Unlike Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks which took the United States by surprise, North Korea’s nuclear threat has been around for some time and looms larger with each passing day. So the United States would not just wait for North Korea to cross the red line. Most likely the United States would exhaust all options to eliminate this security threat before North Korea succeeds in developing nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles with the range to reach the continental United States.

 

North Korea’s nuclear threat is a matter of grave concern not only to South Korea and the United States but also to the whole world. For the sake of world peace, the international community would never allow a rogue state like North Korea to become a nuclear power. The more advanced North Korea’s nuclear program gets, the more tightly the screws will be turned by the international community and the more isolated and impoverished North Korea will become. The UN will have to do everything in its power to force North Korean leaders to think through the consequences that their nuclear program will ultimately bring, if they are unable to do so for themselves.

 

 

The Korea Times

October 2016