Our main advantage in the current North Korea crisis is that we have the luxury to remain calm despite North Korean threats against us:
"From what we know of its existing inventory, North Korea has short- and medium-range missiles that could complicate a situation on the Korean Peninsula (and perhaps reach Japan), but we have not seen any evidence that it has long-range missiles that could strike the continental U.S., Guam or Hawaii," James Hardy, Asia Pacific editor of IHS Jane's Defence Weekly, wrote in a recent analysis.
Our main advantage in the current North Korea drama is that we really aren't vulnerable to North Korean missiles. That and the fact that North Korea doesn't have nuclear weapons yet (they will get them, having successfully tested nuclear device design skills) allow us to remain calmer about threats and avoid preemptive action to defeat threats. We can risk our troops in the region and even Guam with some calm because we have missile defenses for them.
And if North Korea strikes with conventional weapons our allies who are in range, like Japan or South Korea, nothing North Korea has restrains our retaliation.
So our allies Japan and South Korea can also afford to be less itchy with their trigger fingers. Without the confidence that we'd join a counter-attack to smother North Korean attacks if North Korea begins them, Japan or South Korea would need to preemptively attack North Korea to hope to smother North Korea's offensive power before it can do much damage.
But what happens when North Korea does have long-range missiles armed with nuclear warheads that can reach US territory? If Guam, Alaska, and Hawaii are within range of North Korean nuclear missiles, one of two things happen.
One, we join Japan and South Korea by needing to preemptively strike if we think North Korea is capable of striking us and appears ready to do so. It isn't much of a victory to retaliate by bombing North Korea into the stone age if North Korea destroys even one of our cities and kills lots of our people in Guam, Alaska, or Hawaii.
Besides, would we really even bomb North Korea into the stone age? That would kill North Korean civilians in mass numbers who are as much victims of the Pyongyang regime as we would be. Those who say we shouldn't worry about a nuclear North Korea because we could bomb them into the stone age and North Korea wouldn't risk it are apparently more bloody minded than I am.
Mind you, we'd have to retaliate with nuclear weapons if North Korea fires a nuke at us (even if we intercept it) to keep deterrence alive. So we'd tear up North Korean military infrastructure with a bombing campaign mostly conventional but with nukes, too, so future adversaries don't get the idea that we wouldn't retaliate with nukes.
The other thing that might happen if North Korea gets the ability to strike our soil with nukes is that our allies will lose the confidence that we will stand with them if North Korea nukes them. If North Korea nukes South Korea or Japan and still retains nuclear weapons that can hit America, would be retaliate for the strikes on South Korea or Japan and risk North Korea penetrating our thin missile defenses to attack us?
Even if we absolutely would, how sure can South Korea or Japan be that we would?
So if our allies lose faith in our willingness to stand with them in the face of a nuclear North Korea, our allies gain an incentive to acquire nuclear weapons themselves so that they have a deterrence against North Korean nukes.
And we lose the consequence-free option of openly demonstrating our capabilities to reassure our allies because it will also rattle nuclear-armed North Korea. So allies don't get that reassurance that keeps them calm.
Extended nuclear deterrence, which we've promised to keep many allies from going nuclear over the last 60 years, will weaken once we are vulnerable to nuts with nukes. Even Britain and France weren't fully convinced we'd trade New York City for London or Paris. The Germans sure weren't sure about our willingness to trade New York City for Bonn. Only a Nazi legacy kept them from going nuclear, I imagine. That and our longer range nukes placed in western Europe later in the Cold War probably reassured many Europeans that Russia would not refrain from hitting America if American nukes in Europe hit Soviet targets within the USSR.
Nuclear proliferation will be out of the bottle. If even near-stone age North Korea can develop nukes, the advanced countries of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan could, too. China already has nukes, of course. Vietnam won't want to be left out of that club. Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia might feel lonely without nukes, too. Even Australia might not want to be the only major country outside the Asian nuclear club.
And of course, a nuclear North Korea can earn money selling nukes to people we don't want to have nukes, setting off proliferation cascades in other parts of the world. So even as we reduce our nuclear arsenal in the theory that our moves make the world safer, the world will be much less safe as more countries have even small numbers of nukes.
Oh, and as a bonus nightmare factor, once North Korea has a small number of nuclear missiles, they become more likely to use them in a crisis rather than feel more secure as they claim they'll be. They'll know we have incentive to preemptively strike, so North Korea will have a "use 'em or lose 'em" mentality.
Life remains much easier if North Korea does not have nukes. North Korea with nukes is less worrisome than Iran with nukes, I'll admit. But it is still bad. Don't delude yourself into thinking that we can easily live with a nuclear nutball regime in Pyongyang.
UPDATE: The safest option for South Korea, Japan, America, China, and Russia (and even North Korea's long-abused people) might be to partition that gulag with a UN seat. China doesn't want South Korea to control North Korea. We don't want Chinese troops on the DMZ.
