SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea’s test-firing of its latest intercontinental ballistic missile early Monday captured headlines across Asia.
Predictably, the launch ignited indignant protests from Seoul, Tokyo and Washington.
As ever, questions were raised over whether the launch sent a political message or whether the intent was an upgrading of Pyongyang’s weapons engineering skills. The test was conducted a day after the USS Missouri, a nuclear-capable cruise missile submarine, arrived in South Korea.
Experts are poring over the huge missile’s trajectory, range and likely fuel source, but the capability is not new.
North Korea has been ICBM-capable since 2017. This year alone, Pyongyang carried out four other launches of the missile class, including solid-fuel launches in April and July. It has also conducted multiple tests of different missiles, including shorter-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and multiple launch rocket artillery systems.
The dense smoke clouds lingering after these spectacular events obscure an overlooked fact.
Despite his defiance of the international community, his endless weapons of mass destruction tests, his regime’s bellicose rhetoric and its woeful human rights record, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has not killed a single South Korean.
That makes him different from his immediate predecessors — his father and grandfather. His continual thumbing of a well-worn weapons test playbook while declining to shed blood raises a question: Is Mr. Kim reluctant to get his hands dirty?
Bloody history
Mr. Kim is the third-generation Kim to rule in Pyongyang, after the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in 2011.
Kim Jong-il’s reign, which started in 1994, encompassed the sinking of a South Korean corvette that killed 46 and the shelling of a front-line island that killed four. He is also believed to have overseen deadly operations during his father’s term in office.
His father, Kim Il-sung, ignited the 1950-1953 Korean War, a cataclysm that killed 2 million to 4 million. Thereafter, he unleashed multiple deadly attacks: border clashes, commando raids, a bloody hit on the South Korean Cabinet and even the bombing of a civilian airliner.
Mr. Kim the grandson looks far more cautious by comparison. Though two South Korean soldiers were maimed in a land mine ambush in the Demilitarized Zone in 2015, not a single South Korean has died at North Korean hands during his 12 years in power.
Mr. Kim possesses deadlier assets than his predecessors. North Korea conducted its first underground test of an atomic device in 2006 and married that capability to an ICBM capable of striking the contiguous United States 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,” said Mason Richey, an international 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 anymore.”
A nuclear arsenal generates a different level of deterrence but also different levels of risk.
“I think any leader, all things being equal, would prefer to take risk off the table if they can,” Mr. Richey said. “The more you have a nuclear arsenal, the more careful you have to be that conventional provocations do not turn into escalations.”
One expert who has met Mr. Kim agrees but said he also fears a situation in which unforeseen circumstances fracture the status quo.
“[Boxer] Mike Tyson said he had a plan until he was hit — but that when he was hit, the plan was gone,” said Moon Chung-in, a leading South Korean thinker on unification matters who joined all 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 the ill-defined maritime borders flanking the peninsula. Yet Mr. Moon fears an accidental clash could spiral into something far worse.
“We can assume that [the Kims] are rational actors who minimize risk and maximize benefits,” he said. “But once you are hit, you lose your reason.”
More open but still ruthless
As a boy, Mr. Kim spent time in the West and studied at a Swiss school. He adopted a more upbeat, open public persona than his father. Unlike his grandfather, he has summited with South Korean and U.S. presidents.
None of this makes him warm and cuddly.
“We’ve seen him put the screws on dissenters in his regime, and he has not wound down the gulag system,” said Mr. Richey. “I don’t think he is more genteel or that North Korea has mellowed.”
His privileges, his power and his relentless expansion of a nuclear armory may make him the most dangerous 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,” said Chun In-bum, a retired general who 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, longtime senior regime official Jang Song-thaek. Experts believe Mr. Jang’s relations with power brokers in Beijing, personal empire-building within North Korea and possibly disrespect of his nephew led to his death.
In 2017, Mr. Kim’s exiled half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, was poisoned with a deadly nerve agent at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Some believe Kim Jong-nam was meeting U.S. officials or plotting to defect to the West.
All this, Mr. Chun said, makes Pyongyang’s leader genuinely fearsome.
“He is smart, patient and confident enough that he is not rushing into things,” he said. “Once ready, he will present us with a great challenge that will be very difficult to stand up to.”
Fear may be a factor in Mr. Kim’s behavior. Washington has warned Pyongyang that it will be annihilated if it ever uses its nuclear arms.
Mr. Chun worries about the credibility of the current leadership in Washington.
“We have become soft, and I often ask myself: ‘Where are the [Curtis] LeMays of the 21st century?’” he said, citing the late U.S. Air Force bomber general noted for his ruthlessness. “That is the only kind of person these monsters really fear.”
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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