North Korea is not an easy state to understand, for three reasons. First, the DPRK is a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship that is also a hereditary dynasty, and is thus fundamentally different from the sorts of states we are familiar with. Second, its government enforces a statistical blackout. Finally, the North Korean government makes its living, and has done so for over half a century, through significant reliance on strategic deception on a grand scale.

North Korean Strategy

There is a certain logic to North Korea's relentless quest for weapons of mass destruction, and it would be illogical to expect it to relinquish its efforts to develop and perfect WMD.

This is true for two reasons. The first is that the North Korean state is based on its perception of itself as the natural and legitimate inheritor of the entire Korean Peninsula. The second is that the DPRK, unlike most other states in the modern world community, sees the international economy as a source of menace to its stability and authority.

Thus, the North Korean government does not seek to pursue its regime survival in conventional Western terms--with defense sufficiency and trade-based prosperity. Rather, Pyongyang sees itself as a state engaged in an international zero-sum martial-mercantile contest: Pyongyang must in this view either give or receive tribute. North Korea does not wish to be a tributary state, but rather one that receives tribute.

This is a rather difficult philosophy to put into action, and it requires a certain amount of military menace. One instrument for the DPRK is conventional weaponry, and North Korea has one of the largest standing armed forces on the planet today. But given its economic difficulties, the conventional military instrument is not a satisfactory one for implementing policy. Thus, North Korea has reaffirmed the propriety of a quest for ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction, notwithstanding a lingering famine that has killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

U.S. Misconceptions

In such a context, we would be foolish to think that North Korean attempts to develop ballistic missiles and WMD are some sort of bargaining chip. That has been the approach of the South Korean government under the "sunshine" theory, and it was the hope and approach of the U.S. government at the end of the previous administration. But the DPRK's WMD program began in the 1960s, and is now moving towards its fifth decade. It is unusual for people to work on something for five decades if they are hoping to develop a bargaining chip.

On the contrary, it seems that we are looking at a state which is developing WMD as an insurance policy at worst, and at best, a useful tool. A tool that can undermine deterrence, specifically U.S. deterrence on the Korean Peninsula, thereby bringing closer the day of unconditional unification.

Now governments do make mistakes, which is why we do not have Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow any more. But under the preceding analysis, giving up the quest for ballistic missiles and WMD voluntarily would constitute a mistake of monumental proportions for the DPRK government as it exists today.

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI.