| Summary/Abstract |
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.
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