It’s a routine that would verge on the comical if so many lives weren’t at stake. North Korea threatens nuclear destruction in the hopes of extracting concessions out of its neighbors, forcing them to ignore, react to, or placate the pariah state. Last Wednesday, North Korea announced it had detonated its first hydrogen bomb in its fourth nuclear test, and while this claim has been disputed by U.S. officials, the blast—whatever it used—was powerful enough to register as a magnitude 5.1 seismic event. But amidst the sorties, calls for sanctions, and saber speaker rattling, the world by and large shrugged its shoulders.
Kim Jong Un might be a lot of things, says the world. But he’s not crazy enough to provoke a war he knows he’ll lose. The theory of Mutually Assured Destruction proves it: two countries find themselves in an intractable situation. Each wants to achieve its desired outcome, but neither country wants to go to war because they have the power to utterly destroy each other. Any other action would leave the countries in a worse state than before. (This is called a Nash equilibrium.) The upshot of all this is that neither side would be incentivized to start a conflict as it would be irrational.
Thing is, MAD rests on a few assumptions: neither party wants to back down, both parties have things to lose, and both parties implicitly wish to survive.
Here’s where the theory starts to fall apart: North Korea has little to lose compared to its neighbors. South Korea is affluent and globally relevant, making everything from disturbingly catchy k-pop to electronics. Japan remains a powerhouse in technological prowess, and the US, the undisputed superpower. North Korea can’t even afford to keep its lights on at night, run by a government whose sole interest in the people is to provide the bare minimum needed to prevent an uprising or rebellion.
But if the theory of MAD obviously doesn’t fit the narrative, is there an alternative explanation?
A famous analogy (which I would credit if I remember the source) goes a bit like this: two rich bankers walking down the street are suddenly accosted by a tramp who demands their money while pointing something at them from under his coat that looks like a gun. It could very well be little more than just a banana under the coat, and even if it was a gun the pair would ultimately win—but at what cost? Is it rational for the bankers to risk injury or even death for the sake of their wallets?
The North Korean/South Korean conundrum is simply this scenario played out on a global scale. North Korea understands this principle, and relies on it each time it rattles its saber. With its horribly outmoded military, North Korea would be crushed by any serious effort from the United States and its allies. But North Korea can still reliably extract concessions by threatening destruction in the hopes that they value their lives more than their wallet.
There remains, of course, one final issue.
Like the theory of MAD before it, the rich banker dilemma also assumes that the desperate tramp wants to survive.
This brings us to the dreadful endgame question: what if we’re one day faced with a North Korea that doesn’t care about its own survival? A North Korea in freefall collapse will likely not care about the consequences of decimating other nations, or may even want to go out in a blaze of glory. This is the most frightening scenario, because the survival of a good portion of humanity will rest on the tenet that while economists describe what North Korea should do, psychologists will ultimately describe what the country actually does.
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