North Korea's Lessons for (Not) Building an Atomic Bomb
The Predictable Missile Mishap That No One Predicted
Article Summary and Author Biography
Institutional dysfunction will slow or halt Pyongyang's further progress toward an operational nuclear arsenal. The same is true for the remaining would-be proliferators, all of which suffer from a lack of professionalism and poorly-built political systems.
JACQUES E. C. HYMANS is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. His most recent book is Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians, and Proliferation (Cambridge University Press, 2012), from which this essay is adapted.
Essay
Nuclear weapons are hard to build for managerial reasons, not technical ones. This is why so few authoritarian regimes have succeeded: they don’t have the right culture or institutions. When it comes to Iran’s program, then, the United States and its allies should get out of the way and let Iran’s worst enemies -- its own leaders -- gum up the process on their own.
The Tongch'ang-ni rocket launch facility in North Korea. (Courtesy Reuters)
The dismal failure of North Korea's April 13 long-range missile test -- it broke into pieces after 81 seconds of flight time -- has also exposed the poverty of standard proliferation analyses. In the days leading up to the test, most commentators apparently took Pyongyang's technological forward march for granted. Even the more sober voices evinced little doubt that this test would go at least as well as the country's 2009 effort, which managed to put a rocket into flight for about fifteen minutes before it malfunctioned. Meanwhile, other technical experts regaled readers with tales of the "emerging" bona fide North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile force, which might soon be able to target the continental United States. And there were renewed calls for the United States and its East Asian allies to embrace the "Israeli option": pre-emptive military strikes against North Korean strategic weapons facilities. The actual results of the test, however, demonstrate that the analysts' nightmare scenarios were hardly more credible than North Korea's own propaganda volleys.
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