There Is No Precedent for What America Wants From North Korea
There’s one statistic that underscores just how difficult it will be for the Trump administration to achieve its goals regarding North Korea. Following the North’s test of its most powerful nuclear bomb yet, U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis reaffirmed America’s commitment to “the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” which would require North Korea to give up all the nuclear weapons that it built and controls. Only one country has ever done that, and that country’s nuclear-weapons arsenal was far less advanced than North Korea’s is now. What U.S. leaders are trying to do is largely unprecedented.
“In any way I can think about it, [the North Korean case] is unique,” said George Perkovich, a nuclear-weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Numerous countries have pursued nuclear weapons but stopped short of procuring them, abandoning the effort either of their own accord or under duress. But it’s much riskier to apply pressure on a state that has already acquired nuclear bombs, especially when that state is just a nuclear-tipped missile away from its chief adversaries (South Korea, Japan, and so on) and has staked its survival (specifically the endurance of the Kim regime) on those weapons.
