EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No. 8

Author

Jacques E. C. Hymans is Assistant Professor of Government at Smith College in Massachusetts, USA. He is the author of The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and articles in the European Journal of International Relations, the Journal of East Asian Studies, Security Studies, and other publications. Hymans received his Ph.D. from the Harvard University Department of Government in 2001.

This paper was submitted to "EAI Fellows Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia" supported by the Henry Luce Foundation based in New York. All papers are available only through the online database.

What are the strategic intentions and technical capacities of the nuclear program of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), also known as North Korea? Notwithstanding the strident debates over how to deal with the DPRK nuclear issue, in fact no one can claim to know the answers to these basic questions. Indeed, even to the extent rough mainstream consensus answers have emerged, the evidence supporting them is very thin. But the cloud of ignorance that hangs over the DPRK nuclear debate contains a silver lining. The absence of solid information about the case actually can free us to focus on the theoretical assumptions that usually remain implicit in proliferation threat assessments. The result of this exercise is an alternative assessment of the DPRK case that defies the standard formulae. Moreover, the return to theoretical basics promises to improve our understanding not only of this case, but of other current cases of proliferation concern as well. For the sad truth is that even for countries on which plentiful information has been available, the record of strategic threat assessment is abysmal.

The paper is organized as follows. The next section briefly reviews the literature on DPRK strategic intentions and capacities. It finds that even the best, most theoretically self-conscious work on the case suffers from questionable assumptions about the general dynamics of nuclear proliferation. In particular, first, the typical assumption that the DPRK’s nuclear intentions can be viewed as a rational response to the unfriendly post-Cold War external environment can be called into question—not on the grounds that the DPRK is uniquely irrational, but instead because the basic choice to go or not to go nuclear is a revolutionary one that rarely if ever lends itself to rational, cost-benefit analysis. Bomb desires are better understood as the product of non-rational emotions, and in particular, of the fear and pride that grips “oppositional nationalists.” The paper provides evidence that the DPRK leadership is and has always been oppositional nationalist, and preliminary evidence that its desire for the bomb dates back many decades. Second, the typical assumption that the technical challenges of building the bomb are mere nuisances for heavily (albeit inefficiently) industrialized states like the DPRK can also be called into question—not on the grounds that it may not yet have acquired certain key pieces of technology, but instead because its regime type is prone to extreme organizational and managerial ineptitude. The DPRK fits snugly into a class of regimes that from a neo-Weberian perspective can be labeled “neo-patrimonial” or “sultanistic.” The comparative politics literature indicates that even when such regimes gain access to the latest technology, their management pathologies are so pronounced that their “big science” projects routinely run aground. The paper provides preliminary evidence that the DPRK may indeed not be up to the nuclear research and development challenge. Finally, the conclusion of the paper briefly tackles the question of how the United States should handle this very different DPRK than the one usually portrayed...(Continued)