SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea’s test-firing of its newest intercontinental ballistic missile early Monday captured headlines throughout Asia.
Predictably, the launch ignited indignant protests from Seoul, Tokyo and Washington.
As ever, questions are being requested over whether or not the launch despatched a political message — it got here a day after the U.S. nuclear-capable cruise missile submarine the USS Missouri arrived in South Korea — or whether or not the intent was an upgrading of Pyongyang’s weapons engineering expertise.
Meanwhile, specialists pore over the large missile’s trajectory, vary and sure gas supply. However, it’s not a brand new functionality.
North Korea has been ICBM-capable since 2017. In 2023 alone, Pyongyang carried out 4 earlier launches of the missile class, together with solid-fuel launches in April and July. It has additionally performed a number of checks of various missiles, together with shorter-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and a number of launch rocket artillery programs.
But the dense smoke clouds lingering after these spectacular occasions obscure an neglected truth.
Despite his defiance of the worldwide group, his infinite weapons of mass destruction checks, his regime’s bellicose rhetoric and its woeful human rights report, North Korean chief Kim Jong-un has not killed a single South Korean.
That makes him very totally different from his fast predecessors within the job — his father and grandfather. His continuous thumbing of a really well-worn weapons check playbook, whereas declining to shed blood, raises a query: Is Mr. Kim reluctant to get his palms soiled?
Bloody historical past
Mr. Kim is the third-generation Kim to rule in Pyongyang, following the dying of his father, Kim Jong-il, in 2011.
The latter’s reign, which began in 1994, encompassed the sinking of a South Korea corvette, taking 46 lives, and the shelling of a frontline island, killing 4. He can also be believed to have overseen lethal operations throughout his personal father’s time period in workplace.
His father, Kim Il Sung, ignited the 1950-53 Korean War — a cataclysm that killed between two and 4 million. Thereafter, he unleashed a number of lethal assaults thereafter: border clashes, commando raids, a bloody hit on the South Korean Cabinet, even the bombing of a civilian airliner.
Mr. Kim the grandson appears much more cautious by comparability. Though two South Korean troopers have been maimed in a landmine ambush within the DMZ in 2015, not a single South Korean has died at North Korean palms throughout his 12 years in energy.
For positive, he possesses deadlier property than his predecessors. North Korea performed its first underground check of an atomic machine 2006, marrying that functionality to an ICBM able to putting the mainland U.S. in 2017.
“In order to send a deterrence message he does not need to engage in low-level skirmishing and the active use of violence to cow adversaries,” stated Mason Richey, a global relations professor at Seoul’s Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. “Now North Korea has a different set of capabilities — maybe it just does not need to engage in that behavior any more.”
A nuclear arsenal generates a special stage of deterrence, but in addition generates totally different ranges of threat.
“I think any leader, all things being equal, would prefer to take risk off the table if they can,” Mr. Richey stated. “The more you have a nuclear arsenal, the more careful you have to be that conventional provocations do not turn into escalations.”
One knowledgeable who has met Mr. Kim agrees, however stated he additionally fears a state of affairs when the established order is fractured by unexpected circumstances.
“[Boxer] Mike Tyson said he had a plan until he was hit — but that when he was hit, the plan was gone,” stated Moon Chung-in, a number one South Korean thinker on unification issues who joined all of the South Korean presidential delegations that visited North Korea. “I don’t think there will be a war by plan like in 1950: When Kim tests ICBMs or nuclear weapons, he does not kill innocent civilians, but if war starts, there will be enormous collateral damage.”
Mr. Kim has been reluctant to spark direct clashes on the DMZ or on the ill-defined maritime frontiers flanking the peninsula. Yet Mr. Moon fears an unintentional conflict that might spiral into one thing far worse.
“We can assume that [the Kims] are rational actors who minimize risk and maximize benefits,” he stated. “But once you are hit, you lose your reason.”
More open however nonetheless ruthless
Mr. Kim as a boy frolicked within the West, learning at a Swiss college. He has additionally adopted a extra upbeat, open public persona than his father, and in contrast to his grandfather, has summited with South Korean and U.S. presidents.
None of this makes him heat and cuddly.
“We’ve seen him put the screws on dissenters in his regime and he has not wound down the gulag system,” stated Mr. Richey. “I don’t think he is more genteel, or that North Korea has mellowed.”
His privileges, his energy and his relentless growth of a nuclear armory could make him probably the most harmful Kim of all.
“He is a natural-born ruthless personality type, close to a psychopath – a person who cannot relate to the sufferings of other people,” stated Chun In-bum, an ex-general who previously led South Korea’s crack Special Warfare Command. “He has not killed South Koreans directly but has killed his own uncle, and God knows how many others. This is not a man who is risk-averse about taking a life.”
In 2013, Mr. Kim ordered the execution of his uncle, long-time senior regime official Jang Son-thaek. Experts consider Mr. Jang’s relations with energy brokers in Beijing, private empire-building inside North Korea and presumably disrespect of his nephew led to his finish.
In 2017, Mr. Kim’s exiled half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, was assassinated, poisoned with nerve agent in Kuala Lumpur worldwide airport. Some consider Kim Jong-nam was assembly U.S. officers or plotting to defect to the West.
All this, Mr. Chun says, makes Pyongyang’s chief actually fearsome.
“He is smart, patient and confident enough that he is not rushing into things,” he stated. “Once ready, he will present us with a great challenge that will be very difficult to stand up to.”
Fear could also be a think about Mr. Kim’s conduct: Washington has warned Pyongyang that it will likely be annihilated if it ever makes use of its nuclear arms.
But Mr. Chun worries in regards to the credibility of the present management in Washington.
“We have become soft and I often ask myself: ‘Where are the [Curtis] LeMays of the 21st century?’” he stated, citing the late U.S. Air Force bomber basic famous for his ruthlessness. “That is the only kind of person these monsters really fear.”
