Ankit Panda is a New York-based analyst and senior editor at The Diplomat, where he writes on international security in the Asia-Pacific region. He has reported extensively on North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs. He tweets at @nktpnd.

In recent weeks, a deluge of leaks has sprung out from the U.S. intelligence community concerning North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs. Taken together, the leaks portray Kim Jong Un’s regime as nearing mastery of a nuclear-tipped missile that could hit American soil.

Three separate and critical intelligence assessments have emerged in recent weeks that merit attention. First, the U.S. intelligence community, in consensus, now assesses that North Korea is fully capable of developing compact missile-mountable nuclear weapons. Second, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency assess that North Korea has a fissile material stockpile sufficient for 60 bombs today and is producing additional fissile material at a rate of 12 bombs per year.


Finally, the third assessment, which I first reported last week, is that the Central Intelligence Agency assesses North Korea’s intercontinental-range ballistic missile re-entry vehicle technology to likely be sufficient for the delivery of a nuclear device to the United States—meaning it could probably survive re-entry on a normal trajectory and successful detonate that compact nuclear warhead over an American city.

The sudden breakout of leaks as President Donald Trump blusters dangerously about meeting Kim’s threats with “fire and fury” has led well-intentioned observers to see echoes of the run-up to the Iraq war. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, for instance, has suggested that these leaks are aimed at supporting military action—as bogus stories about aluminum tubes and mobile weapons labs were back in 2002.

This is precisely the wrong conclusion.

Instead of paving the path to war, the public release of these intelligence assessments—two of which remain without known consensus within the intelligence community—are likely aimed at injecting caution into the debate over what to do about North Korea. They should cause Americans to understand the value of establishing a stable deterrent relationship with North Korea as we enter an era where its ICBMs are perhaps months from seeing operational deployment. In other words: The time to start a war with North Korea is not after various parts of the U.S. intelligence community assess that it could likely lob a nuclear weapon at U.S. cities today. The window is gone—certainly for a preventative war. Pre-emptive war also raises the uneasy prospect of betting that the United States would be able to detect and destroy all of North Korea’s road-mobile ICBMs, not leaving even a single launcher capable of retaliating with a devastating nuclear strike.

Making the case for a preventative war with North Korea would today defy reality. Kim already has the capability that any such strikes would seek to deny. And it is not clear that a preventative war in the general sense—the notion that, if war is inevitable, it is better for the United States to fight today, not tomorrow—is at all better for the United States, whose relative power will continue to far outstrip North Korea’s. While hawkish officials in the U.S. and South Korea alike may continue to shift the goalposts on prevention by noting that North Korea may not have “completely gained” capabilities like re-entry vehicles—and therefore there’s still time to strike—betting that North Korea can’t hit a U.S. city in a moment of existential crisis doesn’t seem like a bet worth making.

Kim’s fancy new missiles

In July 2017, for the first time, North Korea launched a ballistic missile capable of reaching the continental United States. The Hwasong-14, an ICBM known as the KN20 by the U.S. intelligence community, flew not once, but twice last month. In both tests, North Korea satisfactorily demonstrated that its new two-stage, liquid-fueled ICBM could comfortably surpass the 5,500 kilometer range requirement that the United States and the Soviet Union once agreed would serve as the threshold for an “intercontinental” range missile.

With its second test, which demonstrated operational launch procedures, North Korea left little doubt that it would be able to throw a reasonably compact nuclear weapon—the sort it showed off next to Kim in a February 2016 photograph—from launch sites across North Korea to targets in the continental United States. From Pyongyang’s perspective, the message of that test should have been clear: The era of the North Korean ICBM is here; prevention is out and pre-emption is unacceptably risky.

While the ICBM tests generated the most headlines so far in 2017, they’re far from the full story. This year alone, North Korea has introduced an entirely new suite of impressive ballistic missiles. In February, it showed the world the Pugkuksong-2 (KN15), a road-mobile, solid-fueled, medium-range ballistic missile based on a tracked transporter-erector-launcher. In April and May, North Korea tested the Hwasong-12 (KN17), a new, liquid-fueled intermediate-range ballistic missile that succeeds the Musudan, an older missile that ran into repeated hitches in testing in 2016, as Pyongyang’s primary strike platform for U.S. military assets on Guam. Additionally in May, North Korea introduced a variant of the SCUD-C short-range ballistic missile with control surfaces, allowing it to maneuver in re-entry; Pyongyang claimed the missile introduced an exceptional level of precision to its short-range ballistic missile arsenal.

Combine these observed developments with the latest bout of intelligence assessment leaks and the conclusion is obvious: Despite the exhortations of Trump administration officials, there is no war with North Korea today that does not immediately turn into a nuclear war. North Korea’s nuclear strategy is premised on initiating a first-use against U.S. military targets within the Northeast Asian and Pacific theaters should it detect even a whiff of a pre-emptive attack or decapitation strike against the regime underway to defeat such an attempt, and to use its ICBM arsenal to deter subsequent American nuclear retaliation.

The stages of North Korean grief

If there is a lesson from the lead-up to the Iraq invasion that should inform the policy discussion on North Korea today, it’s that serving officials are mighty effective at working with “alternative facts,” to use the parlance of our times.

An exceptionally concerning example of this came over the weekend, when none other than Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s scholar-soldier national security adviser, appeared to argue earnestly that Kim was irrational and, as a result, undeterrable. McMaster asked how “classical deterrence theory” would apply to “a regime like the regime in North Korea”—questions that were once asked of China and the Soviet Union, similarly brutal communist states on the verge of nuclear breakout. Mao and the Soviets killed vastly more of their own people than Kim or his forebears have, but deterrence worked just fine in those cases. Like those men, Kim’s overarching goal is self-preservation, not war.

If McMaster truly believed that an adversary like North Korea, which is capable of inflicting unacceptable damage against the U.S. homeland today, is undeterrable from doing so, nuclear strategy doctrine argues for striking immediately and ruthlessly, to disarm the Kim regime at all costs. That McMaster has yet to recommend such a course of action suggests that his belief in Kim’s undeterrability is either dishonest or insincere, or that he has failed to grasp the severity of what an irrational Kim would mean for U.S. national security.

There, of course, is a third option: The prospect of being fully deterred by North Korea—the country once described by Richard Nixon as a “fourth-rate … pipsqueak” power—is such a source of cognitive dissonance that McMaster’s unwillingness to concede Kim his rationality is a coping mechanism. As with the stages of grief, the first stage of a superpower accepting deterrence may be denial.

Moving toward acceptance

Fortunately, we don’t need to speculate about whether deterrence can work with North Korea. It has been working for decades. Deterrence is what has prevented the outbreak of full-on war on the Korean Peninsula since 1953, despite numerous North Korean provocations in recent years, such as the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island and the sinking of a South Korean ship in 2010. Pyongyang has been able to prevent an invasion with its artillery, short-range rockets, and especially its biological and chemical weapons. As military analysts invariably note, North Korea could turn Seoul, a city of 25 million people, into a smoldering wreck in a matter of minutes—no nukes required.

This, of course, raises the question of why successive Kims in Pyongyang have felt the need to have nuclear weapons at all, let alone the ability to hit the United States with them. The answer lies in the fates of leaders like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Qadhafi, who had scuttled their nuclear programs only to be forcibly removed by American military might. As an editorial in the country’s state-run Rodong Sinmun observed on August 13, the fundamental lesson of the nuclear age for small and insecure countries like North Korea is that “nuclear possessors did not suffer military aggression.”

For Pyongyang, as long as the United States maintains its forward-deployed military presence in Northeast Asia, extensive sanctions regime and extended deterrence commitments to South Korea and Japan—what it calls the “hostile policy”—its nuclear ICBMs offer its best hope of self-preservation. There is scant evidence to suggest that Kim would attempt nuclear first-use with his ICBMs given the United States’ massive nuclear superiority, ensuring that such a move would all but assure the regime’s end.

While deterrence is old news, the threat of North Korea being able to inflict unacceptable damage to American cities is not, and this explains the U.S. national security establishment’s collective freakout. Americans got used to “mutual assured destruction” during the Cold War, squaring off against comparably sized nuclear-armed dictatorships. It feels strange to be matched against a “pipsqueak” country whose GDP is estimated in the range of $20 billion to $30 billion. Depending on how one runs the numbers, that’s roughly on the order of what the United States is looking to spend on two of its next-generation Ford-class aircraft carriers. Being deterred by a poor, backward and brutal regime like this is a humiliating place to be for a country that still views itself as the unchallenged global superpower.

Perhaps in time the United States will learn to stop worrying and, if not love, at least tolerate a stable deterrent relationship with a North Korea bristling with nuclear-tipped ICBMs. The only other option is teetering on the brink of “fire and fury” every week. And that’s just no way to live 70-plus years into the nuclear age.