China Has Proliferated Nuclear Weapons. What Should America Do?
“The entire United States is within range of our nuclear weapons, and a nuclear button is always on my desk,” Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, boasted in January 2018. “This is reality, not a threat.”
Those words were definitely a threat, and Kim removed all doubt when in April 2022 he stated that these weapons would “never be confined to the single mission of war deterrent.” Those words, in substance, constituted a warning that he would use his arsenal pre-emptively.
The North’s arsenal has boosted Kim’s sense of power. He has, the Wall Street Journal reported in April, “emerged more confident and defiant.” That confidence and defiance makes him an even bigger threat and even more intransigent.
Today, the DPRK, as Kim’s regime calls itself, possesses an estimated 50 atomic devices and fissile material for about 40 more. It can, from all accounts, overwhelm America’s ground-based missile defense system, which has only 44 interceptors, based in Alaska and California.
How did one of the most destitute states in history develop history’s most destructive weaponry?
The world can thank Russia but primarily China. Russia in the 1980s helped Pyongyang build a 5-megawatt reactor, which produces plutonium, fissile material.