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oundtable • the north korean nuclear threat
The Kim Regime’s Prioritization of Survival
North Korea is part of a divided nation and faces the far more powerful
South Korea. Once an agrarian backwater, lagging well behind the then
industrial North until the 1960s, South Korea has become one of the
powerhouses of the world economy. The per capita income ratio between
North and South Korea (1 to 22 if you believe the Bank of Korea’s most
recent estimates) now represents the world’s largest such gap between two
countries that share a land border. 2 This would be a great contrast anywhere,
but in this case the two states are populated by people who speak the same
language, claim a common national identity, and often present eventual
unification as their supreme goal.
The existence of such a neighbor means that any serious political crisis
inside North Korea could easily lead to regime collapse, followed by South
Korea’s absorption of the impoverished North. In a sense, we are talking
about a much-exaggerated version of the German reunification scenario. 3
If such an outcome transpires, the North Korean elites expect no quarter.
Unlike the East German leaders, they indeed have engaged in massive
violations of human rights for decades. The ratio of prisoners to the total
population in North Korea is roughly equal to that of Stalin’s Russia in
the early 1950s: the incarceration of political opponents’ entire immediate
families remained mandatory until the early 2000s, and the regime
conducted terrorist attacks and civilian abductions in earlier stages of
North Korean history. 4 Thus, the country’s elites have good reason to believe
that if their state collapses as a result of a foreign attack or internal popular
revolution, they not only will lose their power and (rather modest) affluence
but also are likely to be held responsible for past abuses.
To prevent such an outcome, North Korean decision-makers are not
only remarkably careful but also remarkably ruthless in their political
planning. They care about regime survival above all, treating all other
considerations as secondary. This is applicable to economic growth, which
in the majority of modern countries has become the paramount factor in
determining state strategy. That is not to say that the North Korean elites
2 Kim Hwa Yong, “Gross Domestic Product Estimates for North Korea in 2015,” Bank of Korea, Press
Release, July 23, 2016.
3 For further discussion of this scenario, see Bruce W. Bennett, Preparing for the Possibility of a North
Korean Collapse (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2013).
4 David Hawk, “The Hidden Gulag,” 2nd ed., Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2012;
and “Taken! North Korea’s Criminal Abduction of Citizens of Other Countries,” Committee for
Human Rights in North Korea, May 12, 2011 u http://www.hrnk.org/uploads/pdfs/Taken_LQ.pdf.
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