kim jong un

NORTH KOREA’S YOUNG DICTATOR TAKES ON THE WORLD

- Norman Pearlstine

FOR A LONG TIME, FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE services knew very little about the weird world of North Korea. Occasionally, their seismic monitors would pick up signs of rudimentary nuclear tests deep in the mountains north of the capital, Pyongyang. Or military satellites would detect the launch of missiles, short- and medium-range, many of which either failed spectacularly or hurtled harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean. But for the most part, the outside world was suffering from what Donald Gregg, a former U.S. intelligence officer and diplomat in South Korea, calls “the longest-running failure in the history of American espionage.”

In 2017, we learned what we’d been missing. Over the course of the year, Kim Jong Un, the youthful, totalitarian leader of the pariah state, unveiled an advanced capacity to threaten the American homeland with a nuclear-tipped long-range missile. On July 4, he launched the first of several missiles capable of reaching Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago. In September, he tested what the U.S. believed was a nuclear warhead that would fit on top of one of those missiles; it was more powerful than the bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. And in the early-morning dark of Nov. 29, North Korea test-fired a missile capable of reaching Washington, D.C., and New York City. Its arc rose 10 times higher than the International Space Station.

Kim has the world’s attention not only because of the threat to the U.S. Henry Kissinger wrote that allowing North Korea to continue with nuclear weapons “will seriously diminish the credibility of the American nuclear umbrella in Asia.” The fear—especially after President Donald Trump suggested in his campaign that South Korea and Japan provide for their own defense—is that they will do so by developing nuclear weapons of their own.