along its border with North Korea, while putting the squeeze on North Korean banks doing business with Chinese entities.
Whether the result of Chinese pressure or technical difficulties, or because the regime was spooked by the ability of U.S. and South Korean intelligence to locate these untested missiles, North Korea removed the Musudans from their launch locations—it wouldn’t attempt to test this missile again until 2016, which it did eight times that year. In 2014, North Korea threatened a “new form” of nuclear test, which some took to be a thermonuclear detonation, but Kim then backed off from this threat, possibly because of the tightening noose of sanctions, his sensitivity to Chinese tolerance, or South Korea’s testing of its own ballistic missile capable of hitting all of North Korea. Kim’s calculus might have been informed by all of these factors, suggesting that he was learning to read his environment and assessing the risks and benefits of his actions, even as he showed every indication of making rapid progress toward the ability to threaten the United States and its allies while developing an arsenal for survivable second-strike options in the event of a conflict.
Meanwhile, we in the intelligence community were also learning to adapt and adjust ourselves to the new reality. We had seen belligerent North Korean actions and behavior before, but the combination of the uncertainty of Kim’s intentions and the escalation of the intensity of his regime’s maneuvers and rhetoric, without an apparent exit strategy, kept the world on edge. Indeed, the world had inadvertently become comfortable with Kim Jong Il’s relatively predictable pattern of provocation followed by a charm offensive to extract political and economic benefits. As the commander of the U.S. forces at Pacific Command Admiral Samuel Locklear told Congress in April 2013, “His father and his grandfather always figured into their provocation cycle an off-ramp of how to get out of it….It’s not clear to me that [Kim Jong Un] has thought through how to get out of it.” Even amid the threats, we in the national security bureaucracy didn’t see signs that North Korea was preparing for war—for example, Pyongyang residents were going about their normal business.
But because the CIA had a duty to warn and prepare for the worst, we maintained vigilance while forecasting to the best of our ability Kim’s intentions in those early days. We were all too aware that the furious pace of the missile tests and the regime’s military modernization efforts had the potential to spiral quickly into an armed confrontation. At the time, one of our biggest questions was who or what served to constrain Kim’s behavior. How likely was Kim to veer toward a serious miscalculation? What—or who—were the brakes or enablers of his actions?
What we were confident about was that Kim’s risk tolerance was high and his confidence was growing.
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Despite all the chest-thumping and bad behavior, Kim is not looking for a military confrontation with the United States. He is rational, not suicidal, and given his involvement in his country’s military affairs and almost certain knowledge of its deficiencies, he is aware that North Korea would not be able to sustain a prolonged conflict with either South Korea or the United States. Although Kim is aggressive, he is neither reckless nor a madman. In fact, he has been learning how and when to recalibrate. And it is his ability to change course and shift tactics that requires us to heed former CIA officer Richards Heuer’s warnings about the “weaknesses and biases inherent in human thinking processes” and continually challenge our assumptions and perceptions about “patterns of expectations” in North Korea analysis. The intelligence community has to learn how to incorporate new information about what is driving Kim Jong Un and how we might counter this profound—and ever evolving—national security threat. So while he has stopped short of actions that might lead to U.S. or allied military responses that would threaten the regime, Kim has also made it clear that he will not give up North Korea’s nuclear weapons, regardless of threats of military attacks or engagement, and that he sees the program as vital to regime security and his legitimacy as the leader of North Korea.
The North Korean regime has often made reference to the fates of Iraq and Libya—the invasion and overthrow of their leaders—as key examples of what happens to states that give up their nuclear weapons. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, at the 2017 Aspen Security Forum, said that