War in Korea?

Since the end of the 19th century, Korea was occupied by Japan, remaining as a colony until the end of World War II. At that time the United States and the Soviet Union divided the country in two, assigning the halves to their respective spheres of influence. The talks for the reunification of both parties failed and by 1948 two ideologically opposed regimes had already been consolidated. The clumsy public exclusion of South Korea as a strategic area of ​​interest for the United States by US Secretary of State Dean Acheson projected the impression that Washington would not be prepared to defend it in the event of an invasion. It triggered the North's offensive and launched a bloody war that was to last for three years with active US involvement.

After the hostilities, an armistice was signed in which the parties pledged to cease fire, but without signing a formal peace treaty. Technically these remain at war. Since then, the family of North Korea's founding leader, Kim Il-sung, remains in power. He was succeeded by his son Kim Jong-il, who in turn was after his death by his son Kim Jong-un. It was precisely the second of these who initiated the country's nuclear program.

In the 1990s it was about to lead the Clinton Administration to bombard its atomic facilities. However, an evaluation of costs and benefits made it clear that this route was unacceptable, leading the White House to sign an agreement with the Pyongyang regime in 1994. North Korea itself undertook to suspend uranium enrichment and Washington was obliged to provide the installation of two light-water nuclear reactors for power generation. Both undertook, at the same time, to advance the normalization of their political and diplomatic relations.

On both sides there were breaches and when in 2002 the United States confronted the North Koreans for the continuation of uranium enrichment, they argued that Washington was also not honoring its part of the deal. Pyongyang pledged nevertheless to suspend such enrichment if the United States gave explicit guarantees not to attack them and signed a peace agreement.

Flagging its usual arrogance, the Bush administration, then in power, preferred to resort to harshness, demanding an immediate and unconditional cessation of uranium enrichment. This was in the same year that Bush had turned preventive action into the central axis of his military doctrine and placed North Korea within the so-called "Axis of Evil." This, at the same time, a year after announcing the development of a defensive missile system to protect the United States from "villainous nations like North Korea".

Curbing a regime afflicted with chronic paranoia was certainly not the best course of action. Especially because there was no capacity to bend it without assuming disproportionate costs. Indeed, in 2003 the Pentagon presented the President with the option of bombing nuclear facilities but, as in Clinton's time, it was dismissed as unfounded. Attacking North Korea involved the destruction of Seoul, the capital of South Korea, which was at a distance of twenty thousand North Korean guns.

It was by virtue of that that Bush accepted a negotiation to six, in which Pyongyang and Washington were the main protagonists. This was, however, far from the face-to-face negotiation pursued by North Korea, desperate to find a reconciliation with the United States. It was a frustrating process and with few results. In the absence of a peace treaty that definitively ended a state of belligerence, Pyongyang detonated its first atomic bomb in 2006.

However, the nuclear program initiated by the second of the Kim never pursued as a matter of priority military objectives, being a political instrument to obtain concessions. His son, however, seeks to transform the country into a nuclear power with effective capacity to intimidate the United States. After five nuclear tests, an arsenal with more than twenty atomic bombs, numerous missile tests, the ability to launch intercontinental missiles and the apparent ability to miniaturize nuclear warheads, the thing is serious. Soon Pyongyang could become a nuclear threat to the continental United States.

At this point the real options for Washington seem to be reduced to two: a pre-emptive strike on North Korean nuclear facilities at the expense of a terrible reprisal on South Korea or a face-to-face negotiation called for normalizing relations and signing a peace treaty. There is no easy way out and nothing guarantees that Kim Jong-un is willing to get rid of his nuclear weapons.