Why Does Kim Jong-Il Want Nuclear Weapons?

If Kim Jong-Il were just an eccentric celebrity-say a film actor or a rock singer-his antics and his paranoia would be just the subject of mild interest in the tabloids. Unfortunately Kim Jong-Il is the leader of a country with nuclear weapons.

Kim Jong-Il may like his cognac and his string of mistresses, but he is also rules his country, North Korea, with the authority of an absolute God-King with the power of life and death over all of its twenty five million people. North Korea, positioned between prosperous and democratic South Korea, huge and tyrannical China, sprawling and tyrannical Russia, and a very nervous Japan, is one of the most impoverished countries on Earth.

The Korean peninsula has been a problem ever since it was divided up between a Soviet occupied North and an American occupied South. One of the first big conflicts of the Cold War broke out when Kim Jong-Il's father, Kim Il-Sung, launched his Soviet armed and trained army south. Three years and hundreds of thousands of casualties later, an American led coalition, sanctioned by the United Nations, had ejected the North Koreans, as well as its Chinese allies, to their side of the border. It has been weapons drawn across one of the most heavily fortified frontiers ever since.

Kim Jong-Il has now successfully tested a nuclear bomb with the yield about the same as the one that destroyed Hiroshima. He has further rattled the cages of his neighbors by testing short range ballistic missiles.

Why does Kim Jong-Il want nuclear weapons, besides the obvious force multiplier such provides? Despite stern admonishments from President Obama and calls for the UN Security Council to do something or another, having the bomb gives Kim Jong-Il something he craves the most-attention and respect. That is to say, the attention one gives to a well armed hoodlum whom one is unwilling to shoot dead.

Dealing with Kim Jong-Il militarily would be difficult and bloody. Kim Jong-Il's army has the capital of South Korea, Seoul, under hundreds of artillery tubes and can turn that city to rubble before the United States military could silence that artillery. Its million man army is formidable and defeating it would be the work of many months and likely tens of thousands of lives.

Kim Jong-Il has little to fear from sanctions. China is in no mood to deal with the refugees that an economic blockade would generate. China also likes the idea of the West being discomforted by a nuclear armed North Korea. Kim Jong-Il can hope to use his possession of nuclear weapons to extract more food and energy aid from the West, in return for vague promises that can and will be broken at will.

President Obama and the other countries concerned with North Korea have very few options. One very important decision Barack Obama must take very shortly is to reverse his decision to cut back development of missile defense systems and instead go all out to build and deploy such defenses. If one cannot make Kim Jong-Il give up his nuclear weapons, at least one can make them less dangerous by mounting a defense against them.

Meanwhile Iran, which has its own nuclear weapons program and is ruled by mad, religious zealots, is watching what reaction the world will take toward Kim Jong-Il's latest provocation and is prepared to act accordingly.

Source: North Korea's Kim Jong Il: Your average madman - armed with nuclear weapons, Michael Saul, New York Daily News, May 26th, 2009