North Korea fired suspected ballistic missiles into the sea on Thursday to help President Donald Trump prove a point: that in the new Cold War, America’s nuclear-armed adversaries are treated differently. Trump appeared to be the first U.S. president to publicly disclose how many nuclear warheads North Korea has in its arsenal—57, he said—roughly matching the latest estimate of 60 by the Federation of American Scientists. South Korea said the number could be as high as 120.
How many nukes does Kim Jong Un really have? Trump’s officials have hinted more than once that the United States is moving closer to recognizing Kim’s regime as a nuclear power, despite the aims of denuclearization it maintains on paper. Trump is quietly revealing a Cold War logic that may explain why he has accommodated North Korea for years but was so quick to attack Iran: if you have the bomb, America will learn to live with you.
The language of the new Cold War resembles that of the old, rooted in hard power and realpolitik. Plus, America has been here before. It was former President John F.
Kennedy, a Democrat, who first began declassifying the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. Postwar American policy, at least with the Soviets, shifted from preventing the proliferation of strategic arms to deterring their use. Leaders in Washington have long understood the utility of nuclear coercion.
It’s why they expected angst in Beijing when the American nuclear umbrella was extended over Japan and South Korea, and why they knew the Kremlin would view upgraded U.S. tactical bombs in Germany as a return to the security dilemma of the 20th century. Kim’s nuclear weapons are “very powerful,” Trump said on Wednesday. If I were president, I wouldn’t have allowed it.
But he’s got ‘em.” “We can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” he added, unprompted. The distinction is clear. Tehran has powerful friends in China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but Trump cares only about the bomb.
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