nuclear weapon—its September 2017 nuclear test indicated a bomb that, at around 150 kilotons, was about ten times bigger than the weapon that the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945—the devastation would be horrific. The bigger 20-kiloton bomb that hit Nagasaki generated a fireball that had an internal temperature of 540,000 degrees Fahrenheit, with portions of the ground below reaching 7,000 degrees. After spending a decade researching and interviewing survivors of Nagasaki, Susan Southard recounted in her masterful narrative, Nagasaki: Life after Nuclear War, what happened in the immediate aftermath. The heat and the blast force melted buildings, scorched bricks, and sent bullets of broken glass into people’s already suffering bodies. One survivor told Southard that he saw people who were so badly burned that he couldn’t tell whether they were men or women even though they were naked. He saw someone whose eyeballs were dangling from their empty sockets. The blast tore off heads and disintegrated internal organs. A woman who covered her face with her hands to protect against the blast found that when she removed her hand her face had melted into her palms.
Beyond the visible physical devastation inflicted by nuclear weapons, the victims and their progeny are vulnerable to the long-term effects of radiation on their genetic, mental, and physical makeup; in fact, the consequences for human beings, animals, and the environment are yet to be fully understood. Roberta Cohen, a leading expert on humanitarian and refugee issues, told an audience at a Brookings Institution event in March 2018 that “no amount of shelter, food, medicine, and gas masks could fully shield a civilian population under direct military attack.” Kim would also deploy cyber tools to confuse, delay, and undermine military and aid efforts.
Even if the United States managed to stay out of it, a second Korean War—potentially involving China, Japan, and South Korea (respectively, the world’s second-, third-, and eleventh-largest economies)—would have global economic ripple effects, impacting electronics, automobiles, and energy markets, while potentially pushing up federal debt in the United States and upending domestic economic priorities. At the March 2018 Brookings event, Scott Seaman, an expert on East Asia economics and trade, said that he would expect “to see massive trade disruptions and the collapse of major supply chains that will result in a significant recession around the world.” Thus, a strike against North Korea is likely to have the unintended effect of sparking a series of events that would lead the United States toward a nuclear war.
The United States and North Korea flirted with disaster in 2017, and to the world’s relief, a clash never happened. But those tense months exposed the disquieting truths that both sides have to reckon with at some point in the future. North Korea was facing a situation in which the regime’s claimed reason for developing and advancing its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities—deterring U.S. invasion and military actions—could backfire into actually inviting a military strike from the United States. At the same time, Kim’s intransigence and aggressiveness, despite U.S. threats of military force, highlighted how a small, impoverished, and isolated country led by a risk-tolerant millennial dictator could undermine and constrain the most powerful country in the world.
KIM BEING KIM
Aware of the growing risk of a U.S. military strike, Kim—aggressive, antagonistic, and angry—reverted to his default style, a comfortable position that might be a demonstration of not only his confidence and arrogance but also his stubbornness. Just days after Trump’s “Rocket Man” speech at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2017, Kim issued a rare, if not unprecedented, full-throated personal response. The statement, released by the regime’s Korean Central News Agency, was accompanied by a picture of Kim looking straight at the camera, sitting at his desk; books are neatly arranged in dignified dark-wood bookshelves that one might find in a CEO’s office in New York or Washington. He was holding a piece of paper, presumably his speech, with a microphone positioned in front of him. The relatively static visual belied the visceral passion and emotion of Kim’s speech, his barely contained rage seeping out from his every word.
Kim condemned Trump’s comments at the United Nations, speaking almost as if he were berating Trump for uttering a speech unbecoming a sitting U.S. president. Trump “made unprecedented rude nonsense no one has ever heard from any of his predecessors,” he said, adding, as if he were the elder statesman in the relationship, “I’d like to advise Trump to exercise prudence in selecting words and