- This event is jointly sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center -
As tensions rise between the U.S. and North Korea, a panel of Stanford experts will convene in Encina Hall on Tuesday, May 30 to assess the issues involved. Panelists will include:
Kathleen Stephens, former U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Korea, William J. Perry Fellow in the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC). She will talk about the South Korean leadership’s thinking and position on North Korea in the context of its U.S. relationship.
James Person, director of the Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation, Center for Korean History and Public Policy. He offers a perspective on the North Korean leadership in the current crisis, including a broader historical context, as well as thoughts on the China-North Korea relationship.
Katharina Zellweger, visiting scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. She will discuss the impact of the current crisis on the North Korean people., and how sanctions and changes in Chinese trade are affecting them.
Gi-Wook Shin, director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, director of the Korea Program, senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and professor of sociology, will moderate the session.
Katharina Zellweger joined CISAC as a Visiting Scholar in September 2013. Previously, she was a 2011–12 Pantech Fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. She came to Stanford after five years of living in Pyongyang as the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Through her SDC and earlier work, she has witnessed modest economic and social changes not visible to most North Korea observers. Her research at Stanford will draw on over 15 years of humanitarian work in North Korea and explore how aid intervention can stimulate positive sustainable change there.
While heading SDC’s Pyongyang office, Zellweger focused on sustainable agricultural production and income generation projects. She is well versed in observing and reporting on political, social, and economic trends and developments.
Prior to joining the SDC, Zellweger worked for nearly 30 years at the Caritas Internationalis office in Hong Kong, the center of its international activities. She organized and led aid and development projects related to North Korea for 10 years there. Her work included collaborating with the media to generate national and international awareness about North Korean humanitarian issues.
Zellweger holds an MA in international administration from the School of International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, and a Swiss diploma in trade, commerce, and business administration. She also apprenticed with Switzerland’s national agricultural management program.
In 2006, the Vatican named Zellweger as a Dame of St. Gregory the Great, and in 2005 South Korea’s Tji Hak-soon Justice and Peace Foundation honored her with its annual award. She is an active member of the International Women’s Forum and of the Kadoorie Charitable Trust.
About the Event: In conversation with Philip Taubman, General Hayden will discuss intelligence and cybersecurity challenges the United States faces in combatting terrorism, dealing with North Korea, Iran and Russia, and will assess President Trump’s relations with the U.S. intelligence community.
About the Speaker: General Michael Hayden is a retired four-star general who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency when the course of world events was changing at a rapid rate. As head of the country’s premier intelligence agencies, he was on the frontline of global change, the war on terrorism and the growing cyber challenge. He understands the dangers, risks, and potential rewards of the political, economic, and security situations facing us. General Hayden dissects political situations in hot spots around the world, analyzing the tumultuous global environment and what it all means for Americans and America’s interests. He speaks on the delicate balance between liberty and security in intelligence work, as well the potential benefits and dangers associated with the cyber domain. As the former head of two multi-billion dollar enterprises, he can also address the challenges of managing complex organizations in times of stress and risk, and the need to develop effective internal and external communications.
In addition to leading CIA and NSA, General Hayden was the country’s first principal deputy director of national intelligence and the highest-ranking military intelligence officer in the country. In all of these jobs, he worked to put a human face on American intelligence, explaining to the American people the role of espionage in protecting both American security and American liberty. Hayden also served as commander of the Air Intelligence Agency and Director of the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center and served in senior staff positions at the Pentagon, at U.S. European Command, at the National Security Council, and the U.S. Embassy in Bulgaria. He was also the deputy chief of staff for the United Nations Command and U.S. Forces in South Korea.
Hayden has been a frequent expert and commentator on major news outlets and in top publications, valued for his expertise on intelligence matters like cyber security, government surveillance, geopolitics, and more. He was featured in the HBO documentary Manhunt, which looked at espionage through the eyes of the insiders who led the secret war against Osama bin Laden, and in Showtime’s The Spymasters, a detailed look at the directors of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Hayden is currently a principal at the Chertoff Group and a distinguished visiting professor at the George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government. He is on the board of directors of Motorola Solutions and serves on a variety of other boards and consultancies. In 2013, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) awarded Hayden the 29th annual William Oliver Baker Award. General Hayden is also the first recipient of the Helms Award presented by the CIA Officers’ Memorial Foundation. In 2014 he was the inaugural Humanitas visiting professor in intelligence studies at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. His recent memoir, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, has been a New York Times best-seller and was recently selected as one of the 100 most notable books of 2016.
Philip Taubman is Adjunct Professor at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is also the former Moscow and Washington Bureau Chief, and Deputy Editorial Page Editor, of The New York Times. Philip Taubman served as a reporter and editor at The New York Times for thirty years, specializing in national security coverage. He is author of Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage, and The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. He is working on a biography of George P. Shultz, the former secretary of state.
Uneasy Partnerships presents the analysis and insights of practitioners and scholars who have shaped and examined China's interactions with key Northeast Asian partners. Using the same empirical approach employed in the companion volume, The New Great Game (Stanford University Press, 2016), this new text analyzes the perceptions, priorities, and policies of China and its partners to explain why dyadic relationships evolved as they have during China's "rise."
Synthesizing insights from an array of research, Uneasy Partnerships traces how the relationships that formed between China and its partner states—Japan, the Koreas, and Russia—resulted from the interplay of competing and compatible objectives, as well as from the influence of third-country ties. These findings are used to identify patterns and trends and to develop a framework that can be used to illuminate and explain Beijing's engagement with the rest of the world.
Abstract: In 1992, North Korea offered to dismantle its plutonium-production reactors in exchange for more “proliferation-resistant” light water reactors (LWRs) from the West, and this offer culminated in the 1994 Agreed Framework with the United States. After the Agreed Framework collapsed in 2002, North Korean negotiators continued to insist that LWRs were a prerequisite for relinquishing its nuclear weapons capabilities. Why has the regime placed such importance on this particular form of energy generation? I examine the history of North Korea’s pursuit of LWR technology, and the shifting role that pursuit played in its diplomacy. A technically informed look at the LWR fuel cycle reveals a network of technical dependence that can draw nations into enduring modes of collective action. At times, and with varying degrees of awareness, actors on all sides of the North Korean nuclear crisis sought to leverage these unique aspects of LWR technology, hoping to lay a path for North Korea to vacate its isolation. This overlooked history offers important lessons for nonproliferation thought and policy.
About the Speaker: Chris Lawrence is a Research Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology and Society in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is trained in nuclear physics and engineering, and is generally interested in the role of knowledge in arms control and disarmament. He was previously Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
Stanford nuclear scientist and CISAC senior fellow Siegfried S. Hecker explains in this article in 38 North why North Korea's recent nuclear test is "deeply alarming" and what Washington's possible policy options are going forward. An excerpted passage is below:
On September 9, 2016, seismic stations around the world picked up the unmistakable signals of another North Korean underground nuclear test in the vicinity of Punggye-ri. The technical details about the test will be sorted out over the next few weeks, but the political message is already loud and clear: North Korea will continue to expand its dangerous nuclear arsenal so long as Washington stays on its current path.
Preliminary indications are that the test registered at 5.2 to 5.3 on the Richter scale, which translates to an explosion yield of approximately 15 to 20 kilotons, possibly twice the magnitude of the largest previous test. It appears to have been conducted in the same network of tunnels as the last three tests, just buried deeper into the mountain. This was the fifth known North Korean nuclear explosion; the second this year, and the third since Kim Jong Un took over the country’s leadership in December 2011. Continue reading
In January 2004, a delegation from Stanford University led by Prof. John W. Lewis and joined by one of the authors, Siegfried S. Hecker, at the time senior fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and former director, was invited to visit the Yongbyon Nuclear Center. This visit by Hecker and follow-on visits during each of the next six consecutive years contributed substantially to our knowledge of North Korean nuclear activities. In this report, we utilize information obtained during the Stanford delegation visits, along with other open-source information, to provide a holistic assessment of North Korean nuclear developments from the demise of the Agreed Framework through November 2015. To read the full article, click here.
A shadowy terror group smuggles a crude nuclear bomb into the United States, then detonates it right in the heart of Washington D.C., setting off a 15 kiloton explosion.
Eighty thousand Americans are killed instantly, including the president, vice president and most of the members of Congress, and more than a hundred thousand more are seriously wounded.
News outlets are soon broadcasting a message they’ve all received from a group claiming responsibility.
It says there are five more bombs hidden in five different cities across the America, and one bomb will be set off each week for the next five weeks unless all American troops based overseas are ordered to immediately return to the U.S. homeland.
The nation is thrown into chaos, as millions scramble to flee the cities, clogging roads and choking telecommunications systems.
The stock market crashes, before trading is halted altogether.
Martial law is declared, amid widespread looting and violence.
That was just one of the nightmare scenarios for a potential nuclear disaster that former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry vividly described as he delivered the Center for International Security and Cooperation’s annual Drell Lecture on Wednesday.
“My bottom line is that the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than it was during the Cold War,” Perry said.
Most people were “blissfully unaware” of the danger that simmering conflicts in geopolitical flash points around the globe – including Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Pakistan – could easily turn nuclear, Perry told the Stanford audience.
A new nuclear arms race with Russia
Perry said he had tried to foster closer cooperation between the U.S. and Russia when he headed the Pentagon during the mid ‘90s and helped oversee the joint dismantling of four thousand nuclear weapons.
“When I left the Pentagon, I believed we were well on the way to ending forever that Cold War enmity, but that was not to be,” he said.
William J. Perry shares a video depicting the threat of nuclear terrorism with a Stanford audience.
Since then, relations between the West and Russia have soured badly, prompting Russia to modernize its nuclear arsenal and assume a more aggressive nuclear posture.
“They’re well advanced in rebuilding their Cold War nuclear arsenal, and it is Putin’s stated first priority,” Perry said.
“And they have dropped their former policy of no first use of nuclear weapons, and replaced it with a policy that says nuclear weapons will be their weapon of choice if they are threatened.”
While Perry said he believed Russian president Vladimir Putin did not want to engage in a military conflict with NATO forces, he said he was concerned about the possibility of Russia making a strategic miscalculation and stumbling into a conflict where they might resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
“If they did that there’s no way of predicting or controlling the escalation that would follow thereafter,” Perry said.
Chinese economic problems increasing tensions
In Asia, a slowing Chinese economy could exacerbate domestic political tensions over issues such as wealth inequality and pollution, and encourage Chinese leaders to divert attention from problems at home by focusing on enemies abroad.
“China has had more than 10 percent growth now for almost three decades, but I think there’s trouble ahead,” Perry said.
“The time-proven safety valve for any government that’s in trouble is ultra-nationalism, which in the case of China translates into anti-Americanism and anti-Japanese.”
China has seen a major growth in military expenditures over the last decade, and it has used that investment to build a blue water navy and develop effective anti-ship missiles designed to drive the U.S. Navy hundreds of miles back from the Chinese coastline.
One potential flash point for a conflict between China and the U.S. are the artificial islands that China has been building in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.
“In a sense, China is regarding the South China Sea as a domestic lake, and we regard it and most other countries regard it as international waters, so their actions have been challenged by the U.S. Navy and will continue to be challenged,” Perry said.
North Korea’s growing nuclear threat
Meanwhile, China’s neighbor North Korea has continued to defy the international community and conducted another nuclear test in January.
“North Korea is today building a nuclear arsenal, and I would say clearly it’s of the highest priority in their government, and they have adopted outrageous rhetoric about how they might use those nuclear weapons,” Perry said.
William J. Perry delivers the Drell Lecture in an address entitled "A National Security Walk Around the World."
North Korea followed up its latest nuclear test with a satellite launch earlier this month – an important step towards developing an intercontinental ballistic missile that could threaten the United States mainland.
“These missiles today have only conventional warheads that are of no significant concern, but they are developing nuclear warheads,” Perry said.
“They already have developed a nuclear bomb, and the latest test, as well as tests to come, will be designed to perfect a bomb small enough and compact enough and durable enough to fit into a warhead. If they succeed in doing that, then the bluster will become a real threat.”
Perry said he hoped China and the United States could combine forces and adopt a “carrot and stick” diplomatic approach to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program – with the United States offering aid and international recognition, and China threatening to cut off supplies of food and aid.
He said he expected to see “more acting out” from the North Korean regime in the coming months, in the form of further nuclear and rocket tests.
Like it or not, the Iran deal is the only deal we’ll get
The landmark deal reached last year, where Iran agree to curtail its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions, was a better resolution than Perry had expected to the negotiations, but it has met with significant resistance from groups he described as “strange bedfellows.”
“The opposition in Israel and the United States opposed the deal because they fear it will allow Iran to get a bomb,” Perry said.
“Whereas the opposition in Iran opposed the deal because they fear it will prevent Iran from getting a bomb. Both cannot be right.”
Many Republican presidential hopefuls have publicly stated on the campaign trail that they would withdraw from the deal if they got elected to the White House, but Perry said that would be a strategic mistake.
“The opposition in the United States has a simple formula – we should withdraw from the deal, we should reinstate sanctions, and we should renegotiate a better deal,” Perry said.
“Let me be as blunt as I can, this is a pure fantasy. There is not the remotest possibility that the sanction could be reapplied if the United States withdraws from this deal, because the day we withdraw from the deal, our allies are gone, the sanctions are gone, there will be no renegotiations without sanctions, so this deal, like it or not, is the only deal we will ever get.”
Another “Mumbai” attack could spark regional nuclear war
Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan have more than a hundred nuclear weapons on each side, as well as the missiles to deliver them, and a conventional military conflict between them could quickly escalate into a regional nuclear war, Perry said.
Another large-scale terror attack, like the coordinated assault in Mumbai that killed more than 163 people in 2008, could lead India to retaliate militarily against Pakistan (which India blames for encouraging the terror groups operating in Pakistani territory).
Perry said he was concerned that Pakistan would then use tactical nuclear weapons against invading Indian troops, and that India might then respond with a nuclear attack of its own on Pakistan.
“So this is the nightmare scenario of how a regional nuclear war could start,” Perry said.
“A nightmare that would involve literally tens of millions of deaths, along with the possibility of stimulating a nuclear winter that would cause widespread tragedies all over the planet.”
A ray of hope
Despite all the potential for nuclear disaster in the current geopolitical environment, Perry said he was still hopeful that nuclear catastrophe could be avoided.
"While much of my talk today has a doomsday ring to it, that truly is not who I am,” Perry said.
“I’m basically an optimist. When I see a cloud, I look for a ray to shine through that cloud.”
One important step toward reducing the nuclear threat would be improving relations between the U.S. and Russia, he said.
“My ray of sunshine, my hope, is I believe we can still reverse the slide in U.S. Russia relations, he said.
“We must begin that by restoring civil dialog. We must restore cooperation between the United States and Russia in areas where we have mutual interest…If we succeed in doing that, then we can work to stop and reverse the drift to a greater and greater dependence on nuclear weapons.”
Perry ended his speech by urging the audience to keep striving to rid the world of the threat of nuclear weapons.
“We must pursue our ideals in order to keep alive our hope – hope for a safer world for our children and for our grandchildren,” he said.
Stanford nuclear experts said they were skeptical of North Korea’s claim that it had detonated a hydrogen bomb this week.
However, they said the test was an important step forward for North Korea’s nuclear program and would have a destabilizing effect on the entire region.
“I don’t believe it was a real hydrogen bomb, but my greatest concern is not so much whether or not they actually tested a hydrogen bomb, but rather that they tested at all,” said Siegfried Hecker, former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has “a track record of exaggerated statements, hyperbole and outright lies,” according to Scott Sagan, Caroline S.G. Munro professor of Political Science.
“The propaganda machine in North Korea has made all sorts of claims about Kim Jong-un’s personal prowess and his history, and it is totally unsurprising that he might make exaggerated claims about North Korea’s military prowess,” Sagan said.
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said he also doubted that North Korea had detonated a two-stage hydrogen bomb.
“Whether it’s a hydrogen bomb or not, it’s very dangerous, destabilizing development,” said Perry.
“It’s obvious they’re working to increase the capability and size of their nuclear arsenal and that represents a huge danger to the region and creates major instability and major concerns on the part of South Korea and Japan.”
Many North Korea watchers had been anticipating another nuclear test.
“We’ve thought that the North Koreans could test at any time – that the tunnels were ready, that they could do this at any time – so it would be a political decision, not a technical decision,” said Thomas Fingar, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Hecker said North Korea’s latest nuclear test would move the country closer to being able to miniaturize a nuclear warhead and mount it on a missile, extending the reach of their nuclear weapons.
“They will have achieved greater sophistication in their bomb design – that is the most worrisome aspect,” Hecker said.
“At this point, what makes their nuclear arsenal more dangerous is not so much explosive power of the bomb, but its size, weight and the ability to deliver it with missiles.”
On the diplomatic agenda, the U.S. and its allies will likely push for stronger sanctions in the wake of the tests, according to Kathleen Stephens, a former U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea and William J. Perry fellow at Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC).
“In the UN the U.S., Japan and South Korea will likely look for another, and stronger, UN Security Council resolution, presumably with some efforts to attach to it some teeth and strengthen sanctions,” Stephens said.
The U.S. Congress is currently considering financial sanctions that would cut of all access to U.S. banks for any banks dealing with the North Koreans.
But financial sanctions would likely be less effective in dealing with North Korea than they had been with Iran, according to Fingar.
“It’s like hitting a masochist,” said Fingar.
“North Korea is relatively insulated from the external economy, where Iran wasn’t. Iran had a middle class, you could make sanctions hurt, they could have a real effect. You could make it hard for the North Koreans to buy luxury goods, but at the end of the day, is that going to bring down the regime?”
Financial sanctions against North Korea could have the unintended consequence of also hurting China, said David Straub, associate director of the Korea program at APARC.
“This could be problematic for China because many of the transactions that North Korea conducts would be going thorough Chinese banks, and the Chinese, understandably might not be happy about the US financial sanctions on them, in effect,” Straub said.
Perry recommended that the U.S. reinvigorate diplomatic talks with North Korea in collaboration with China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.
“I would not give up on negotiations with North Korea yet,” Perry said.
“What could have been done many years ago was following through on negotiations with North Korea at the turn of the Century, which were proceeding robustly in the last years of Clinton’s second term, but were abandoned by the Bush Administration...That was a geo-strategic error.”
But Hecker said those negotiations would be harder now.
“I have previously argued that we should focus on three “No’s” for three “Yes’s” – that is no more bombs, no better bombs (meaning no testing) and no export – in return for addressing the North’s security concerns, its energy shortage and its economic woes,” said Hecker.
“This could have worked when I first proposed it 2008 after one of my seven visits to North Korea. It will be more difficult now."
Former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Siegfried Hecker assesses North Korea’s claim to have detonated a hydrogen bomb in an underground nuclear test this week. Hecker is one of the world’s top experts on the North Korean nuclear program. He has visited North Korea seven times since 2004, and is the only Western scientist known to have ever been inside a North Korean uranium enrichment facility. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a research professor of Management Science and Engineering.
Do you believe that North Korea actually detonated a hydrogen bomb in its latest nuclear test?
I don’t believe it was a real hydrogen bomb, but my greatest concern is not so much whether or not they actually tested a hydrogen bomb, but rather that they tested at all. Since this test worked, they will have achieved greater sophistication in their bomb design – that is the most worrisome aspect. This is their fourth test – with each test they can learn a lot.
What makes a hydrogen bomb a more threatening weapon than a conventional atomic bomb?
A hydrogen bomb can be a hundred or a thousand-fold more powerful than a fission bomb. Certainly a blast of a megaton will be much more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb, but the more important part is the ability to deliver at long range and to do it accurately. That is what would threaten the United States and its allies most; even with the size of nuclear blasts they have already demonstrated.
White House officials say that initial data from nearby monitoring stations are not consistent with a hydrogen bomb test. How will we know for sure whether it was a hydrogen bomb or not?
The short answer is that we may never know. The telltale signs of a hydrogen bomb are very difficult to pick up in a deeply buried test. Typically hydrogen bombs have greater explosive power or yield. This test is currently believed to have resulted in a seismic tremor of 5.1 on the Richter earthquake scale. That would make it roughly equivalent to the third nuclear test in February 2013. At that time, North Korea claimed it tested a miniaturized atomic bomb – there was no mention of a hydrogen bomb. My estimate of the yield for the 2013 test is roughly 7 to 16 kilotons – which is in the range of the 13-kiloton Hiroshima blast. As far as destructiveness, a Hiroshima-scale explosion is bad enough. Detonated in Manhattan, it may kill as many as a quarter million people. The power of the 2013 and the current explosion is more consistent with fission bombs than hydrogen bombs.
Can you rule out the possibility that it was a hydrogen bomb?
I find it highly unlikely that the North tested a real hydrogen fusion bomb, but we know so little about North Korea’s nuclear weapons design and test results that we cannot completely rule it out. A modern hydrogen bomb is a two-stage device that uses a fission bomb to drive the second stage fusion device. A two-stage device is very difficult to design and construct, and is likely still beyond the reach of North Korea today. However, by comparison, China’s early nuclear weapon program progressed rapidly. It tested its first fission bomb in 1964 and less than three years later demonstrated a hydrogen bomb – and that was 50 years ago. North Korea has now been in the nuclear testing business for almost 10 years, so we can’t rule anything out for certain.
If it wasn’t a hydrogen bomb, what kind of bomb might it have been?
What may be more likely than a two-stage hydrogen bomb is that they took an intermediate step that utilizes hydrogen (actually hydrogen isotopes) fuel to boost the explosive yield of the fission bomb, a sort of turbocharging. Such a device has a fusion or “hydrogen” component, but is not a real hydrogen bomb. It allows miniaturization – that is making the bomb smaller and lighter. Moreover, it would be the first step toward eventually mastering a two-stage hydrogen bomb.
The most important aspect then is to miniaturize, whether it is a fission bomb, a boosted fission bomb, or a hydrogen bomb. The Nagasaki bomb weighed 5,000 kilograms. It was delivered in a specially equipped B-29 bomber. North Korea wants to demonstrate it has a deterrent. To do so, it needs to be able to credibly threaten the U.S. mainland or our overseas assets. For that, you have to make the bomb (more correctly, the warhead) small enough to mount on a missile. The smaller and lighter, the greater the reach. At this point, what makes their nuclear arsenal more dangerous is not so much explosive power of the bomb, but its size, weight and the ability to deliver it with missiles.
How close is North Korea to being able to credibly threaten a nuclear strike against the mainland United States?
North Korea is still a long way off from being able to strike the US mainland. It has only had one successful space launch. It needs a lot more, but it has a large effort in that direction.
Do you think North Korea conducted this test for political or technical reasons?
North Korea had very strong technical and military drivers for this test, as well as follow-on tests. The political environment is mostly what has constrained it from testing earlier and more often. However, this test demonstrates that Pyongyang is willing to weather the political storm this test will bring. It has done so for all previous tests.
What are your current estimates on the size of North Korea's stockpile of nuclear weapons and materials?
Much like in the area of sophistication of the bomb, we have little information of what North Korea actually possesses. The best we can do is to estimate how much bomb fuel, plutonium and highly enriched uranium, they may have produced and estimate how many bombs they can produce from that stockpile. My best estimate at this time is that they may have enough bomb fuel for 18 bombs with a capacity to make 6 to 7 more annually. That, combined with the increased sophistication they surely achieved with this test, paints a troublesome picture.
How should the U.S. respond?
I am concerned about we haven’t done to date. Washington has lost many opportunities we have had since North Korea began its nuclear weapon production in earnest in 2003. One thing that’s clear is that doing what we and the rest of the world have done so far – half-hearted diplomacy, ultimatums, and sanctions – have failed, so these are not the answer. I have previously argued that we should focus on three “No’s” for three “Yes’s” – that is no more bombs, no better bombs (meaning no testing) and no export – in return for addressing the North’s security concerns, its energy shortage and its economic woes. This could have worked when I first proposed it 2008 after one of my seven visits to North Korea. It will be more difficult now.
Abstract: How do leaders win power struggles in Leninist regimes? The political science literature emphasizes the importance of institutions in such polities: institutionalization allegedly provides a mechanism for distributing patronage, prevents the military and secret police from playing a special role, and strictly delineates the group that selects the leadership. This project instead argues that the defining feature of one-party states is the lack of institutionalization. Power struggles are therefore determined by prestige and sociological ties, politicized militaries and secret police, and the manipulation of multiple decision-making bodies. I test the relative explanatory value of these two competing sets of hypotheses by examining the power struggles fought by Nikita Khrushchev, Deng Xiaoping, and Kim Ilsung. The historic failure to institutionalize leadership selection had a tragic legacy: its absence is crucial for understanding the origins of stagnation, the tragedy at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and the Kim family multi-generational personality cult.
About the Speaker: Joseph Torigian is a Ph.D. student at MIT interested in Chinese, Russian, and North Korean elite politics and qualitative methods. His current research uses archival material to investigate how war affects political authority in authoritarian regimes. Before coming to MIT, Joseph worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and studied China's policies towards Central Asia as a Fulbright Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. He has conducted dissertation research at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University. He received his BA in Political Science at the University of Michigan and speaks Chinese and Russian.
William J. Perry shares a video depicting the threat of nuclear terrorism with a Stanford audience.
William J. Perry delivers the Drell Lecture in an address entitled "A National Security Walk Around the World."