This article was originally published on the Wall Street Journal.
Diplomacy won’t stop Kim Jong Un from launching missile tests. That happens only when the money runs out.
Rocket Man is on another blasting spree. Last week Pyongyang tested a “monster” intercontinental ballistic missile, reportedly designed to strike any spot in the U.S. and overwhelm American missile defenses with multiple warheads. Since the beginning of the year North Korea has conducted more than a dozen launches—including cruise, rail-based, hypersonic and intermediate-range ballistic missiles—as well as an unsuccessful long-range missile test earlier this month. But why now? What does Kim Jong Un want from his sudden fireworks display?
The explanations from Washington and Asian capitals for these latest launches sometimes sound like the naive foreign-policy punditry from the 1990s, at the very start of Pyongyang’s methodical march to nuclear status. We hear that the Kim regime is trying to get our attention, for example, or that it is shoring up its domestic legitimacy.
Have we really learned so little from a generation of confrontation with this revisionist state? By now it should be clear to observers that Pyongyang fires off new weapons because their development is vital to its fundamental strategic goal of unifying the Korean Peninsula under Kim rule.
To achieve unconditional unification on its own terms, North Korea would first have to break the U.S.-South Korean military alliance. Pyongyang hopes to do that through a nuclear showdown with America. We don’t need to guess about this. Immediately after the latest ICBM launch, one North Korean media outlet explained Mr. Kim’s reasoning for building these new armaments: “the long-term demand of our revolution,” the North Korean term for conquest of the South, presupposes “the inevitability of the longstanding confrontation with the U.S. imperialists.” The logic is simple: No weapons testing, no unification.
This is why regular and recurrent missile launches and nuclear detonations are an essential and entirely predictable feature of North Korea’s behavior. New weaponry has to be tested before the North’s scientists and generals can be certain that it works. Pyongyang is totally committed to strategic modernization, for which Mr. Kim laid out a program in detail at the Party Congress early last year. Advancing that agenda will require continual performance checks on the new equipment, just as past progress in nuclear and missile capabilities necessitated North Korea’s previous experiments.
But why the current flurry of launches? The likely answer is that this is simply Pyongyang’s first opportunity to conduct them. Though Pyongyang has proved adept at keeping outsiders in the dark about its weapons programs, the record suggests North Korea tests prototypes essentially as soon as it can.
The regime seems unwilling (perhaps doctrinally incapable) of waiting until later to test its munitions when it can launch them now—hoping to rush them to mass production as soon as possible.
Planned tests are of course sometimes scheduled for propagandistic considerations—July 4 and North Korean national holidays being especially favored dates for launches and explosions. But the North generally seems to test its new equipment as soon as it is deemed ready, which sometimes turns out to be before it actually is, as this month’s launchpad failure of a long-range missile attests.
Yet for all its haste, Pyongyang also takes curiously long breaks between launches. It’s been more than four years since the North last tested an intercontinental ballistic missile.
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