Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un and Expanding Perils of Inadvertent Nuclear War

In discussing pertinent risks of a US-North Korea nuclear war, analytic and public attention are ordinarily focused on intentional conflict. This essay identifies core distinctions between deliberate and inadvertent nuclear war and explains why the latter could soon prove especially worrisome. Opinion

Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un and Expanding Perils of Inadvertent Nuclear War

Photo: AP

"Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the way to survival or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed." (Sun-Tzu, The Art of War)

One of the most significant dangers ahead with North Korea concerns unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war. Oddly, public attention to this increasingly realistic prospect remains overshadowed by closely-related threats stemming from an intentional or deliberately-calculated nuclear attack. Although these related threats may deserve our primary analytic focus, they should never be considered apart from the risks of a nuclear conflict caused by accident or miscalculation.

In essence, a more coherent and comprehensive US policy assessment is now required. To begin, it is necessary to understand that any serious war risks posed by accident or inadvertence could be different from the hazards of any deliberate nuclear war. More precisely, the attendant risks of a deliberate nuclear war would ensue only from those Washington-Pyongyang hostilities that had been (1) expressly initiated with nuclear weapons; or (2) expressly responded to (retaliation) with nuclear weapons. This is the case whether such unprecedented uses were undertaken for purposes of achieving strategic surprise, or as the plainly fearful result (expected or unexpected) of enemy irrationality.

In any deliberate nuclear war scenario, and before any presidential ordering of American preemptions, North Korean leadership would need to appear operationally nuclear and psychologically irrational to US intelligence. Without the second expectation, any US preemption against an already-nuclear adversary would be prima facie irrational. Washington, therefore, must continuously monitor not only tangible North Korean nuclear assets and capabilities, but also the manifestly less tangible mental health characteristics of Kim Jong-un. Although some might mock this second intelligence imperative as unnecessary or just plain impossible, it remains conceivable that the "unbalanced" dictator in Pyongyang has merely been pretending irrationality.

After all, it is Kim Jong-un's counterpart in the White House (not Kim himself) who has publicly mused about the potential decisional rationality of pretended irrationality.

When the US president and his national security advisors consider the co-existing and equally fearful prospects of an accidental or inadvertent nuclear war with North Korea, their primary focus should always be oriented in more institutional directions – that is, toward the expected stability and reliability of Pyongyang's command, control, and intelligence procedures. Should it then be determined that these core "C3I" processes display unacceptably high risks of mechanical/computer failure; indecipherable pre-delegations of nuclear launch authority; and/or unpredictable/unreliable launch-on-warning procedures (sometimes also called "launch-on-confirmed-attack"), a still-rational American president could then feel the need to consider an appropriate preemption.

In any event, at this already late stage in North Korean nuclear military progress, the expected costs to the United States and certain of its pertinent allies of any such defensive first-strike would be more-or-less overwhelming, and perhaps even "unacceptable."

There is more to think about. Any such residual American resort to "anticipatory self-defense" could be nuclear or non-nuclear and could be indicated in these circumstances without express regard for Kim Jung-un's presumed rationality. Still, the reasoned cost-effectiveness of any US preemption would almost certainly be enlarged by such carefully calculated presumptions.

What would be the most plausible reactions concerning a Trump-ordered preemption against North Korea? When all significant factors are taken into account, Pyongyang, likely having no meaningful option to launching at least some massive forms of armed response, would intentionally target certain designated American military forces in the region, and/or high-value South Korean armaments and personnel. US President Trump, still assuming enemy rationality, should then expect that whatever its precise configuration of selected targets, North Korea's retaliatory blow would be designed to avoid any massive (possibly even nuclear) American counter-retaliations.

All such high-consequence calculations would assume perfect rationality on all sides. If, for example, the American president should somehow decide to strike first, the response from Kim Jung-un should then expectedly be proportionate, that is, more-or-less similarly massive. In this particular escalatory "game," the willful introduction of nuclear weapons into any ensuing conflagration might not be dismissed out of hand by either "player."

Noteworthy, too, at least at that markedly uncertain point, such a game-changing introduction would more likely originate from the American side. This critical inference is based upon the understanding that while North Korea already has some nuclear weapons and missile delivery vehicles, it is also still rational, and not yet operationally prepared to seek "escalation dominance" vis-à-vis the United States. For the moment at least, it would seemingly be irrational for Pyongyang to launch nuclear weapons first.

Sometime, in principle, President Trump, extending his usually favored stance of an argumentum ad baculum, could rationally opt for a so-called "mad dog" strategy. Here, choosing a plan that has nothing to do with the nickname of his own Secretary of Defense, the American president, following his just-ordered preemption, would deliberately choose a strategy of pretended irrationality.

Any such determined reliance, while intuitively sensible and arguably compelling, could backfire, thereby opening up a slippery path to now unstoppable escalation. This self-propelling competition in risk-taking could also be triggered by the North Korean president, then perhaps pretending to be a "mad dog" himself. Significantly, a feigned irrationality stance by Kim Jong-un might be undertaken exclusively by the North Korean side, or in an entirely unplanned tandem, "together" with the United States.

In all of these dialectical postures, each side would have to pay especially close attention to presumed wishes and intentions of both Russia and China.

It is all bewilderingly complex. It is also plausible, in such complicated circumstances, that the North Korean leader would no longer be pretending irrationality, but would have become genuinely irrational.

If President Trump's initial defensive first strike against North Korea were conspicuously less than massive, a still rational adversary in Pyongyang would likely take steps to ensure that his own chosen reprisal was correspondingly limited. But if Trump's consciously rational and calibrated attack upon North Korea were wittingly or unwittingly launched against an irrational enemy leadership, the response from Pyongyang could then be an all-out retaliation. This presumptively unanticipated response, whether non-nuclear or a non-nuclear-nuclear "hybrid," would be directed at some as yet undeterminable combination of US and allied targets.

By any sensible measure, of course, this response could inflict unimaginably grievous harms.

It is now also worth considering that a North Korean missile reprisal against US interests and personnel would not automatically exclude the American homeland. However, should the North Korean president maintain a determinedly rational "ladder" of available judgments, he would almost certainly resist targeting any calculably vulnerable portions of the United States. Should he remain fully willing to strike certain targets in South Korea and/or Japan, he would still incur very substantial risks of an American nuclear counter-retaliation. In principle, such a US response would follow directly from this country's treaty-based obligations regarding "collective self-defense."

Such risks would be much greater if Kim's own aggressions had extended beyond hard military assets, either intentionally, or as the unwitting "collateral damage" brought to various soft civilian populations and infrastructures.

Even if the stunningly complex game of nuclear brinksmanship in Northeast Asia were being played only by fully rational adversaries, the rapidly accumulating momentum of events between Washington and Pyongyang could still insistently demand that each "contestant" strive relentlessly for escalation dominance. It is in the unpracticed dynamics of any such explosive rivalry that the prospect of an authentically "Armageddon" scenario could be actualized. This unprecedented outcome could be produced in unexpected increments of escalation by either or both of the dominant national players, or instead, by any sudden quantum leap in destructiveness applied by the United States and/or North Korea.

Looking ahead, the only element of the foreseeable game that is predictable in such hideously complicated US-North Korean calculations is this situation's inherent and boundless unpredictability. Accordingly, even under the very best or optimum assumptions of enemy rationality, all relevant decision-makers would have to concern themselves with potentially dense or confused communications, inevitable miscalculations, cascading errors in information, unauthorized uses of strategic weapons, mechanical or computer malfunctions, and poorly-recognized applications of cyber-defense and cyber-war.

Technically, a further analytic distinction is needed between inadvertent nuclear war and accidental nuclear war. By definition, of course, an accidental nuclear war would necessarily be inadvertent, but an inadvertent nuclear war need not be reciprocally accidental. False warnings, for example, which could be spawned by mechanical, electrical or computer malfunction (or by hacking) would not signify the cause of an inadvertent nuclear war.

Instead, they would fit under clarifying narratives of an accidental nuclear war.

"Everything is very simple in war," says Carl von Clausewitz in On War, "but the simplest thing is still difficult." With this banal but profound observation, the classical Prussian strategist makes plain that authentically serious military planning is always problematic. Largely, this is because of what he famously called "friction." In essence, friction describes "the difference between war as it actually is, and war on paper."

In today's stunningly transient geopolitical context, one of the most worrisome perils to the United States and its allies will flow from inherently unpredictable errors in knowledge and information. Going forward, unless they are mutually understood to include managing risks of an inadvertent or accidental nuclear war, any upcoming talks between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un could prove meaningless and futile. While the conspicuous dangers of any deliberate nuclear conflict between the United States and North Korea should warrant our primary conceptual attention, they ought never to be assessed apart from these closely-associated and sometimes less frequently considered risks.

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Louis René Beres, a frequent contributor to Israel Defense, is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue University. He lectures and publishes widely on matters of Israeli security and nuclear strategy