It is too late to get North Korea to give up its nukes

TWO vain, prickly, strutting loudmouths hurl colourful threats at each other. Were they hip-hop artists engaged in a rap battle, it might be entertaining. But since they both have nuclear weapons, it is not. At the UN General Assembly on September 19th President Donald Trump threatened to “totally destroy North Korea”, a country of 25m, along with “Rocket Man”—its leader, Kim Jong Un. Mr Kim retorted that he would “surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire”. Meanwhile, the North Korean foreign minister raised the prospect of testing a thermonuclear bomb over the Pacific, and American strategic bombers made a show of force off North Korea’s east coast. North Korea declared that tantamount to a declaration of war, and said that next time it might shoot them down.

For Americans it is as if a half-vanquished enemy is “rising zombielike from the crypt of...dimly remembered wars”, as Blaine Harden, a veteran writer on North Korea, puts it. Unlike the Vietnam war, which is perennially relived and relitigated, the Korean war of 1950-53 is largely forgotten in America. Yet it brought about the utter devastation of the Korean peninsula, along with the deaths of 2.5m civilians and 1.2m soldiers, among them 34,000 Americans. After a massive Chinese intervention, it ended with Korea as divided as it had been before.

The history matters. The inescapable lesson is that another Korean conflict would carry such a price that risking it should not be an option. Those who appear to think that military action is a plausible route wildly overplay the chances of a swift, clean result and vastly underplay the likely costs of conflict, particularly if it went nuclear, or if the North deployed its biological and chemical weapons. Scott Sagan of Stanford University reckons 1m people could die in the first day of a second Korean war.

America suffers from Korean amnesia partly because, as Mr Harden argues, an inglorious stalemate is not easy to celebrate (even the 1970s sitcom M*A*S*H, although set in Korea, was really about the Vietnam war, then under way). It is worse, though. Yes, Americans were fighting a just war, defending South Korea against Soviet-sanctioned invasion by the Communist North. They were supported by an “uncommon coalition” of countries—from Turkey to Thailand—in what was the first instance of collective security agreed upon by the young UN. Yet the Americans prosecuted the war up to their chests in a moral swamp.

Senior commanders turned a blind eye to atrocities by South Korean forces against suspected Communists and prisoners-of war. Worse, the American destruction of the North’s towns and cities was near-total, leading to unconscionable civilian suffering. In early 1951 Douglas MacArthur, the American commander of UN forces, was even eager to drop atom bombs on Chinese forces that had come to the North Korean regime’s defence.

Better forgotten. Yet in North Korea, the war is ever-present. North Koreans are ceaselessly reminded of the American destruction. Mr Trump, sounding like a latter-day MacArthur, plays right into the propaganda. Above all, North Koreans have all along been told it was the American-backed South that started the war, rather than a North Korean invasion of South Korea.

Mr Kim surely does not believe that lie. He and his generals know the war went awfully for his grandfather, Kim Il Sung. He approached the invasion with breathtaking naivety. The South would rise up in support of him; the Americans would not commit troops; it would all be over in three days. He was wrong on all this and more. When Communist China committed 300,000 troops to stop the creation of a united, US-allied Korea, the “Great Leader” was shunted aside as military commander and had to twiddle his thumbs while others saved his odious regime.

Things would go far worse for North Korea a second time round (not least since ties with China, which does not want to pick a fight with America over North Korea, are deeply strained). Mr Kim surely knows this. But does Mr Trump know that he does? Mr Kim cannot be dissuaded from seeking a nuclear arsenal, for he sees it as his chief guarantee against American attack. But he realises that using it would bring about his destruction. So the big risk is an accidental war, caused by each side misreading the other’s intentions. That is what America must guard against.

Cold comfort

Instead of swagger and threats, America should prepare for an extended cold war, containing and deterring a new nuclear power. Some of the military implications are awkward. For instance, beefing up missile defences or bringing tactical nuclear weapons back to South Korea would hugely unsettle China (see article), straining the world’s most crucial relationship.

Other necessary steps will be almost as awkward. If misreading the other side’s intentions is the risk, one answer is to invite North Korea to open an embassy in Washington, however galling that may feel; a hotline between Pyongyang and Seoul should also be revived. Spycraft and diplomatic skill are needed for an effective regime of sanctions against the North, but so is flexibility—for instance in trading reassurances for early notice of North Korean missile tests. And America must find new ways to signal to ordinary North Koreans that their regime is the real target, not them. This is not impossible, as trade and defector networks manage to bring much information from outside into the North.

Mr Trump has as little patience as he has a taste for history. But, as Mr Sagan points out, an enduring strategy of deterrence and containment worked not only with the Soviet Union. It also, for over 60 years, discouraged the North from invading South Korea again. And for all that it now possesses nuclear weapons, Mr Kim’s regime is still tinpot and decrepit, atop a mountain of resentment and wasted human lives. The chances still must be that, one day, the North will collapse under its own contradictions. Just wait.