The Truth About the North Korea Nuclear Threat

The announcement Tuesday that North Korea had launched a ballistic missile ended a more than two-month break in the country’s missile tests. Yet the fact that Pyongyang appears capable of launching a missile “all the way to North America” doesn’t change a simple fact, writes Robert Kelly for Newsweek. America can live with a nuclear North Korea.

“For many years, the United States has put up with three other countries whom we deeply distrust -- Russia, China and Pakistan -- having nuclear weapons,” Kelly writes. “When China developed nuclear missiles in the 1960s and ’70s, we did not interfere, even though China was going through the tumult of the Cultural Revolution. Similarly, when Pakistan nuclearized in the 1990s, the U.S. did not intervene, even though Pakistan had, and still has, serious Islamic fundamentalism problems.

“In each instance, a state in deep ideological opposition to the U.S….acquired nuclear weapons and set off an anxious discussion in the U.S. about ‘fanatics’ with the world’s worst weapons. Yet the alternatives were even worse. Airstrikes on China would have set the whole of East Asia ablaze; dropping special forces into Pakistan to hijack its weapons -- an idea briefly considered -- would have been a near-suicide mission; striking the ‘Islamic bomb’ might have sparked a regional Muslim revolt. In all cases, U.S. officials found the risks of action outweighed by the risks of trying to manage the new status quo. In time, Washington adapted.

“This is almost certainly what will happen with North Korea.”

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