Putin and Kim
and all those nuclear arms
Amid the constant barrage of news, noteworthy things do slip by without much consideration. Yesterday’s news that Kim Jung Un launched ‘super-large’ rockets into the Sea of Japan reminded me in the wee hours of this morning that public sources claim he has missiles capable of reaching the United States and that Pyongyang developed indigenous nuclear weapons over the past thirty years. Certainly not cheery news for any of us to ponder at any hour.
Reports surfaced last week that Vlad the Impaler reminded the world that Russian forces are on ‘constant alert’ should a nuclear war start. The Russian dictator reminded his audience in a state television interview a week ago that ‘weapons are there to be used’ and that he could (would appears the implication) use them if the ‘existence of the Russian state’ or its sovereignty were challenged.
We ignore threats from either of these swaggering leaders at our peril. Only last month The New York Times ran an editorial arguing that it is not correct to say that nuclear war is imaginable but ‘it’s not imagined enough’.
Perhaps Annapolis is now a vacuum where things distract me from serious conversations but I am somewhat surprised the Times’ opinion series ‘At the Brink’ did not shut down stupid conversations (which is what we are largely regurgitating of late—is he really a billionaire? was that a body double? can you use body deodorant for your privates?) in favour of thinking about implications for at least a few days.
Few people remember today that the early 1980s was a period on the knife’s edge concerning nuclear war. President Ronald Reagan opted to deploy medium range nuclear weapons in Europe in hopes of ending the vulnerability he saw from the Soviet numerical advantage in delivery systems resulting from détente (1972-1978), but his actions ignited protests across Europe. The Catholic Bishops’ issued a 1982 letter opposing nuclear weapons, hardly a non-political action. In the autumn a year later, much of the country watched a Sunday evening movie, The Day After, hypothesising effects of a nuclear detonation on Lawrence, Kansas, one of several films on the effects of using these arms. We know now that in September 1983, the Soviets falsely believed Reagan was attacking them. A single man, Stanislav Petrov, courageously rejected the information, refusing to act; he prevented a full scale Soviet nuclear response. It was a period of much national anxiety and division on the best path forward to defend the United States and the world. Mikael Gorbachev’s choice to pursue perestroika which ultimately led to the end of the Soviet Union a decade later seemed to put the angst to rest. This was a generation after we came within a hare’s breath of nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba.
The fears of nuclear break outs by first Saddam Hussein, then the Kim dynasty in Pyongyang became political challenges with deep implications. The Saddam Hussein fears led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent turbulence in that Middle Eastern country with no nuclear weapons ever found. North Korea, on the other hand, evaded agreed to prohibitions on creating its own nuclear devices. By 2002 when U.S. officials announced that Pyongyang was indeed pursuing such weapons, the nuclear genie was too hard to put back into the bottle despite what remains a failed aspiration of ‘denuclearising’ the Norks.
Only a few years later, full out diplomatic shuttling sought to prevent India and Pakistan, both acknowledged nuclear states, from going to war with one another. The instability of the Islamabad regime in the shadow of a much more powerful arch enemy in India leaves that tension eternally simmering but not yet boiling into a war where one state actually uses these potent weapons.
Simultaneously, the mullahs in Teheran pursue a dodgy game of claiming to pursue civilian nuclear power in the face of being an petroleum-exporting, energy-rich nation. Decades of declaring the ultimate goal of eradicating Israel, itself assumed holding atomic arms, makes this as volatile as the subcontinent. A subtext of the current war against Hamas is always the question of what role the Islamic Republic played in inciting the entire effort to kill Jews on 7 October and beyond.
America, Britain, France, and China also have substantial nuclear arsenals with modernising efforts underway for the PLA over the past decade.
In short, the Cold War finally ended on 31 December 1991 but the proliferation of nuclear weapons—despite the survival of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which will celebrate its 55 anniversary next year—accelerated as fear and power devolved into different cultural areas. We worried about the former Soviet republics having components from the Red Army but the problems were actually different. Nuclear weapons became a further indicator of the late Samuel Huntington’s argument about a clash of civilisations. Until now, the literal clashes have not included nuclear weapons but their proliferation to the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Sinic and Korean cultures is quite evident.
W.J. Hennigan in his contribution to the four opinion pieces in ‘The Brink’, argued that we ought recognise that we are considerably closer to savage destruction than commonly understood. I recommend reading the piece for yourself. You may well dismiss it but it is certainly a powerful piece to consider in an era when we discuss nuclear weapons far less often than two generations ago.
What I want to stress here, however, is one particular common element in Pyongyang and Moscow. Perhaps the element is also true in Teheran, Islamabad, Beijing, and Delhi although I don’t think so. I also believe London, Washington, Jerusalem, and Paris don’t think at all like the Korean or Russian leaders. Please feel free to push back after you have thought about my argument.
The leadership in Russia and North Korea are currently the most dangerous nuclear states for two interrelated reasons. Both of the rulers, Putin and Kim, view themselves as synonymous with both their regimes and the survival of their nations. In this case, nations are not legal entities but cultural, historic, religious, linguistic, and ‘blood’ entities of a more metaphoric nature. Even though the CCP sees itself as central to China’s modernisation over the past forty-five years, they do not equate Sinic culture with the CCP. They could get to that point but I don’t think we will see that. In all of the other capitals, the governing personalities either have competitors within their state or recognise (although they may not like) that their cultures thrive abroad in other portions of the world. Both Kim and Putin see themselves as the embodying cultures located in the territory they currently occupy. By surrendering that for whatever reason, they see their personal safety, their regimes, their decades’-long crafting of a narrative as intimately linked to that land and those who live precisely there. This is a non-negotiable fact in their eyes.
Second, these are two extraordinarily limited regimes in the availability of instruments beyond oppression and nuclear weapons. Certainly Russia survives because it has natural resources for export but Putin’s haranguing about the need to eradicate Ukraine calls attention to his need to raise the culture, religion, and history of Mother Russia in a way that even the Islamic Republic, with its three thousand year Persian odyssey replaced by Islamic reactionaries, does not. Because neither Putin nor Kim has an array of instruments or a global support network of a diaspora to replace their self-created myths and foci, they believe nuclear weapons are viable instruments to assure no one will end their regimes and, by extension, their rule.
I see this as tremendously threatening ot the world. Kim remains, now well into his second decade as supreme leader, an eight-year-old needing global attentnion to reinforce his self confidence (if not to put fear into potential successors lurking in the shadows). Threatening Seoul and/Tokyo remains an instrument of statecraft for him via long-range missiles as well as the nuclear option. Fear is a dangerous motivator so we can never be certain he won’t decide his regime truly is about to end—for a variety of possible reasons—so why not hurt everyone else in the process.
Putin’s evil aspirations clearly would not end with ousting a sovereign regime in Kyiv but he hungers for a mythological Russian role in the world that existed in novels and the minds of the ruling class. Of course Russia remains the largest land mass in the world but it also has a decline population which he has tried unsuccessfully to reverse for a quarter century. This conflict is wiping out what young, able men—along with the poor who have no options to flee—the system still had. The kleptocracy Putin participates in, sanctioned by a xenophobic Russian Orthodox church he adores, is obviously intricately linked in his mind to a history stolen from the ‘people’ today. Putin, in short, sees himself as a modern tsar for whom no task is too grandiose nor any failure tolerable. Anyone threatening to undermine his assumptions about Russia’s role in the world is a threat, at home or abroad, and that includes foreign nations. He chillingly illustrates daily his cavalier willingness to put his definition of Russia’s survival—his own—above anything else in the country. The nuclear weapons he so blithely discussed on state tele a week or so ago ought to keep us all awake at night as his threats are unquestionably real.
And yet the world has far less power to do much about either of these men than we want to accept. Paranoid individuals trust no one. Kim uses Beijing when it suits him (and they certainly recognise this makes them look weak but it’s easier to blame us than take any responsibilities in Zhongnanhai for how the past seventy-five years evolved). Putin’s chilling smile and football-field long distances from foreigners indicates a man believing he is unchallenged in life—and he is taking steps to assure that he does not become someone’s victim.
Yet both are far more likely to fall at the hands of either mother nature or internal forces than our actions. We need walk a careful line with each. It’s seductive to look for internal opponents or exiled saviours but the Iraq experience ought caution us on letting Koreans solve Korea while Russians address their own problems.
So what should we do? We need continue focusing on these two issues above anything else. We continue our ties with South Korea and Japan to deter the North Koreans from further nuclear proliferation or attacking South Korea; let Beijing fend for themselves as he is capable of turning on them if pressured. That is a weak reed but his delivery capabilites and knowledge of his weak legitimacy may goad him into actions which hurt us far more than what we gain from pressuring him.
For Putin, we need continue the harshest sanctions possible and the massive public diplomacy to shame Beijing from cooperating with him. Make clear the dangers of his statements rather than keeping them under wraps. No one should assume he would not turn on other states if needed to survive. Reinforce the Ukrainians but do not send NATO troops to become a pretext for escalation. Those don’t sound like much but they are powerful steps over time as Russia too wearies.
These are expensive propositions. We should not kid ourselves that we can do either, much less both of these, on the cheap as that is preposterous. But, we must at the same time recall that either of these men will use nuclear weapons if they believe we are succeeding at eradicating their creations of nations. That is a really tough balancing act that requires continued engagement where in our interests (not random for the same of chatter). Acquiescing to either of them will embolden them. Nuclear damn us if we do nor if we don’t, it seems.
This is a risky time, probably only to get worse.
I welcome your many thoughts as some of you have vastly more policy experience than I. I also keenly want to hear what the Kips and Angies around the country not in government think about these dangers.
Thank you for reading this column. Please feel free to circulate if you find it of value.
Be well and be safe. FIN
W.J. Hannigan, ‘On the Brink: Opinion’, NYTimes.com, 7 March w2024, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/07/opinion/nuclear-war-prevention.html
Dzirhan Mahadzir, ‘North Korea Fires ‘Super-Large’ Rockets into the Sea of Japan’, USNI.org, 19 March 2024, retrieved at
Max Seddon, ‘Russia ‘prepared’ for nuclear war, warns Vladimir Putin’, ft.com, 13 March 2024, retrieved at https://www,ft,cin/content/e04da727-ee9c-4e8c-94fa-2e7ad72bec24
The National Council of Bishops, ‘A Pastoral Letter on War and Peace’, 3 May 1983, retrieved at https://www.usccb.org/upload/challenge-peace-gods-promise-our-response-1983.pdf