Response to bungled NK attack?

[caraher]

Reading a piece on new intelligence regarding possible integration of a nuclear warhead onto a missile by North Korea made me wonder what the likely, and the appropriate, responses might be to a bungled nuclear strike.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) released a classified assessment last month saying that it now has “moderate confidence” that the “North currently has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles however the reliability will be low..."

So in the event that the North Korean leadership is as stupid/suicidal as those promoting this threat would have us believe, the most likely outcome of any attempt to take a swing at US territory might be a miss (whether because of an inaccurate missile or malfunctioning warhead). It strikes me that, were this to happen, it would be even harder to figure out what response would be appropriate than if the attack took a heavy toll. Were the North Koreans to kill a lot of Americans, Obama would be able to justify just about any kind of military response he saw fit to make, at least in terms of public and world opinion.

It's less clear, however, what kind of military response to an ineffectual attack would seem appropriate. In some ways, it might tend to undercut all the hype about the threat and make doing anything drastic seem even less appropriate. On the other hand, such an unquestionably belligerent act certainly would remove any doubt about their intentions, and nobody would expect the US simply to wait quietly while North Korea developed a more mature capability for a future strike.

I also wonder how all this would interact with the deployment of similarly-unreliable ballistic missile defenses. If there were an attack and the defenses seemed to work, what then? Would that suggest less of an imperative to do anything aggressive to stop future attacks?

It's all very tricky to sort out. We get news stories about the North Korea threat, including the one I linked that purports to tell how intelligence is figuring out North Korean capabilities (and which reinforces the idea that the threat is genuine). It's hard to take these stories at face value after the 2002-2003 Iraq war buildup, even if we no longer have the Bush crew in charge. And we also have defensive weapon systems being rushed into place that themselves have a dubious track record. If North Korea launched a missile at Guam or Alaska or the west coast and it wound up in the drink, I don't think we'd have any good way of knowing what really happened - a fizzle or a successful intercept. I do wonder which spin would be considered more favorable to the military-industrial complex - that's the one I'd expect to hear, regardless of the truth.

[TwilightGardener]

1. I don't think anyone is really "promoting" the threat. I don't think Obama or Congress or the

Pentagon is hyping the threat to get more money for the military. I don't see any similarity to the Iraq war run-up. That was a very different thing, led by a different crowd, for different reasons. I just don't see "MIC" written all over this--I think there's a genuine danger, and no good solutions. A lot of people are going to die if this can't be resolved peacefully, and I doubt it can be resolved peacefully. Edit to add: there will always be the warmonger/McCain/Cheney types, they are to be ignored.

[Ganja Ninja]

2. That's the part about nukes the NK leadership doesn't get.

It's not like lobbing a few artillery shells at an island. You shoot off even one nuke and you go right to the top the the military's to do list. The status quo is no longer tolerable and the problem will get attended to until it's settled one way or another.

[leveymg]

3. Add to this complexity the fact that we don't wnat to reveal the true capabilities of the ABM system

I have the feeling that there's already a lot of intentional ambiguity about actions already taken during previous tests.

[Marrah_G]

4. If they launch at us, the military will respond I think, even if they miss

I wouldn't want to wait until they got it right...... think of what that would mean.

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. Who is rooting this threat?

[caraher]

6. I'll admit I'm confused by the whole thing

I don't really think anyone is really itching for another war, but it does seem like there's more coverage of each North Korean act of bluster than the level of threat to the US really merits, given how predictably disastrous the consequences of following through on any of them would be. So I'm partly trying to figure out why that is so, and along the way just wondered "what if..."