ID | 157755 |
Title Proper | Why not bomb north korea? theories, risks, and preventive strikes |
Language | ENG |
Author | Jackson, Van |
Summary / Abstract (Note) | Scholars expect that a state possessing nuclear weapons has strong incentives to proactively attack its non-nuclear adversary rather than allow it to go nuclear. So why has the United States not already bombed North Korea? This article presents three different frames through which policymakers evaluate the North Korea threat—to deterrence, to nuclear nonproliferation, and to regional stability. In each, preventive strikes play a different primary role, and the article explains the frame– specific risks that inhere in different “theories” of preventive strikes based on their intended purpose. The analysis shows that, in the North Korea context, preventive strikes are a crude and unreliable instrument of policy: any purpose preventive strikes might serve is put in jeopardy by the strikes themselves. Past U.S. presidents would have been unlikely to bomb North Korea even if they faced more desperate circumstances than they did, if only because it would have required assuming risks that historically the United States has not been willing to accept. |
`In' analytical Note | Korean Journal of Defence Analysis Vol. 30, No.1; Mar 2018: p.1-19 |
Journal Source | Korean Journal of Defence Analysis Vol: 30 No 1 |
Key Words | North Korea ; Risk ; Coercion ; U.S. Foreign Policy ; Preventive Attac ; Theory Of Victory |