North Korea As It Is
North Korea as It Is
The Case for a Cold Peace
Victor Cha
May/June 2026 Published on April 21, 2026
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In the early 1990s, even before North Korea had any nuclear bombs, the United States began to realize that it would be the world’s next nuclear threat. At the time, North Korea barely had enough fissile material to build one or two crude bombs. It lacked the delivery systems that would allow such weapons to reach the United States. And it would be well over 15 years before the regime would do its first nuclear test. Yet concerned government officials and observant journalists recognized that North Korea was intent on obtaining nuclear weapons and would ly become a source of regional instability.
Three and a half decades later, North Korea has blown past even the most pessimistic predictions of its nuclear development. It has amassed 50 nuclear bombs and stockpiled enough plutonium and highly enriched uranium to build 40 to 50 more. It has developed nearly 20 different delivery systems, including long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that can reach targets in the United States. It is actively pursuing ballistic missiles that can be launched from nuclear submarines, whose range and ability to evade detection improve North Korea’s ability to strike back even if the United States attacks first. Pyongyang has tested its nuclear weapons six times and its various delivery systems more than 300 times. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un intends to develop a modern nuclear weapons arsenal the size of that of France or the United Kingdom, each of which has over 200 nuclear weapons, and he is well on his way. In return for North Korea’s provision of thousands of combat troops, millions of rounds of ammunition, and hundreds of ballistic missiles in support of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Moscow is helping Pyongyang surmount the technology hurdles that prevent Kim from building the nuclear arsenal of his dreams.
Since the potential nuclear threat emerged in the early 1990s, the United States’ North Korea strategy across seven presidential administrations has been driven by the logic of preventing nuclear proliferation, or what came to be called CVID—complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization. American negotiators dealing with North Korea have repeated the same mantra: “With denuclearization, all things are possible. Without denuclearization, nothing is possible.” Washington’s strategy has been to offer incremental incentives, such as food and energy aid, to North Korea, in exchange for similarly scaled nuclear concessions—for example, a temporary freeze on operating reactors and a declaration of its nuclear inventory. And the United States has relied on economic sanctions to bring North Korea to the negotiating table and to pressure it to comply with nonproliferation agreements.
The size and sophistication of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal today shows that these approaches have failed. In addition to inconsistent U.S. policy and a lack of attention to North Korea amid perennial crises elsewhere in the world, the United States has struggled to implement and enforce denuclearization agreements because of a lack of buy-in from both North Korean leaders and U.S. presidents. Partisan divides in Washington have also forced each new administration to restart the negotiation cycle, and Pyongyang has repeatedly acted in bad faith by growing its nuclear programs and reneging on its commitments. Ultimately, a dearth of trust between North Korean and American leaders dating back to the Korean War—reinforced by many unsuccessful negotiations and agreements—has made it impossible to rein in Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions. The one-dimensional focus on nonproliferation has also hamstrung the United States in other areas of importance in which it could negotiate, such as reducing the size of North Korea’s conventional military or improving human rights. The use of economic sanctions as the primary tool of diplomacy, moreover, has not curtailed the nuclear program, and has only hardened resolve in Pyongyang.
The United States cannot continue the same approach; doing so will only make its failures more acute. Nor can it stand aside and do nothing because North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is increasingly able to target the U.S. homeland and a stronger North Korea can flex its military power to help U.S. adversaries, as it is doing by supporting Russia in Ukraine. The challenge is now even more daunting than in the past: with plentiful trade in energy and food with China and Russia, and combat experience and weapons technology from the Ukraine war, North Korea is in a much stronger position than it was in 2019, the last time U.S. President Donald Trump and Kim met to negotiate.
The United States should not renounce denuclearization, but policymakers must acknowledge that it is now a distant objective. Moving forward, Washington needs a new strategy that does not let the long-term goal of denuclearization get in the way of its more immediate national security needs. These include protecting the homeland, reducing the number of U.S. adversaries, minimizing the chances that North Korea would launch nuclear weapons first, and weakening the ties between Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang. Instead of making denuclearization a prerequisite for any negotiation, the United States should open conversations with Pyongyang on arms control agreements, limits on nuclear testing and missile production, crisis management mechanisms, and bans on the transfer of nuclear weapons or technology to others. It should also strengthen deterrence and defense with regional allies to gain their support for this new strategy. In other words, the United States needs a cold peace with North Korea—a relationship short of normalization but that prioritizes open dialogue to avoid miscalculation and escalation.
The world would be a safer place if North Korea shed its nuclear weapons. But getting it to give up its arsenal is simply not within reach any time soon, and proceeding as if it were would be detrimental to national security. Washington needs to reorient its strategy toward North Korea so that it can achieve more immediate gains, reduce tensions, and make the world safer now. The best strategy for avoiding a hot war with a nuclear North Korea is to preserve a cold peace.
NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP
An undeniable fact underpins North Korea’s successful pursuit of nuclear weapons. Three consecutive leaders—Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and now Kim Jong Un—were determined to build a nuclear arsenal at any cost. It was never North Korea’s intention to get rid of its nuclear weapons, regardless of the agreements it entered into that suggested it might. In 2006, when I was deputy head of the U.S. delegation at the six-party talks in Beijing aimed at denuclearization, one of my North Korean interlocutors told me bluntly: “We will never give up our nuclear weapons.” The United States had attacked Afghanistan and Iraq, he reasoned, because they didn’t have nuclear weapons. North Korea was not willing to tempt the same fate.
Kim Il Sung, the first leader of the modern North Korean state, recognized the awesome power of nuclear weapons in 1945, when, as a guerrilla fighter in the mountains of Manchuria, he witnessed how the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended Japan’s brutal colonization of the Korean Peninsula. Once in power, Kim signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in 1959, and pleaded with Chinese leader Mao Zedong for nuclear weapons after China successfully tested them in 1964. (Mao denied the request.) The next year, however, Kim began operating a small experimental research reactor supplied by the Soviet Union. According to declassified CIA satellite imagery, Kim then razed and excavated large plots of land—far more than what was needed for a simple research reactor—at what would eventually become the expansive Yongbyon complex, North Korea’s main nuclear site. Contrary to popular opinion, the country’s nuclear program did not start as an insurance policy after the end of the Cold War; Kim’s intentions were evident more than three decades earlier.
North Korea covertly built its nuclear program while repeatedly signing denuclearization agreements with the United States. Pyongyang’s unrelenting drive for weaponization lay at the heart of every nuclear crisis of the past three decades, regardless of which American president was in office or what tactics Washington pursued. In 1994, President Bill Clinton demanded that North Korea refrain from starting a campaign to harvest weapons-grade plutonium. When North Korea did so anyway, Clinton considered a military strike to take out the Yongbyon complex. But as the administration was contemplating its options, former president Jimmy Carter accepted Kim Il Sung’s invitation to visit North Korea; Carter and Kim established the outlines of a deal that became the Agreed Framework, signed later that year. North Korea froze the operating reactor and stopped construction on two additional reactors in return for heavy fuel oil (a byproduct of crude oil that North Korea could use for energy) and two light-water reactors (a more modern nuclear reactor whose fuel cannot easily be converted into weapons). Many observers attributed the collapse of this agreement, in 2002, to hawks in the George W. Bush administration who wanted to sabotage a Clinton-era success, but the real cause was Pyongyang’s secret purchase of materials to build an alternative uranium-based nuclear bomb.
The six-party talks hosted by China and attended by Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea, and the United States produced a second major denuclearization agreement, in 2005. The countries at the talks again promised to provide North Korea with heavy fuel oil and a light-water reactor, as well as diplomatic normalization, economic assistance, and regional security assurances, in exchange for Pyongyang’s freezing, disabling, and dismantling all of its nuclear programs. North Korea shut down parts of the Yongbyon nuclear reactor, destroyed the reactor’s cooling tower, and surrendered—for the first time—operating records and hardware samples that helped the intelligence community understand the program’s scope. The United States also partially lifted sanctions and removed North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. But this agreement failed, too—not because of Kim Jong Il’s sudden stroke in 2008 or the obstinacy of the George W. Bush administration, as some analysts believe, but because of North Korea’s unwillingness to fully declare its nuclear inventory, its support of Syria’s attempt to covertly construct a nuclear reactor, and its determination to conceal progress on its secret uranium enrichment program, which it publicly admitted to completing in 2009, after years of denial.
The Obama administration reached a new agreement on the last day of February 2012, which became known as “the Leap Day Deal.” Washington promised food, humanitarian support, and economic assistance to North Korea in exchange for a freeze on nuclear and missile testing. But just weeks later, North Korea launched a satellite despite U.S. warnings that disguising ballistic missile tests as civilian rockets violated the deal. The short-lived agreement fell apart in early 2013, when North Korea tested a miniaturized and more powerful nuclear device, resulting in nearly five years of isolating the regime with heavy U.S. and international sanctions on North Korean trade, businesses, political leaders, and financial transactions.
Trump’s first-term summit diplomacy with Kim Jong Un also faltered because of North Korea’s unrelenting pursuit of weaponization. Before the first meeting of the two leaders in Singapore, in June 2018, North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb and launched 17 ballistic missiles, including ICBMs designed to reach the United States. Although Kim committed to denuclearization in that meeting, he never ed through, and the two leaders were unable to strike a deal in two subsequent summits. From then through the end of the Biden administration, in 2024, Washington continued to impose bilateral and multilateral sanctions while Pyongyang conducted an unprecedented 107 missile launches. And in 2023, North Korea formally enshrined the possession of nuclear weapons in its constitution and announced a move to mass production of nuclear capabilities, which meant that it was ready to turn from developing and testing weapons to exponentially expanding its nuclear arsenal. Kim affirmed this direction in a speech to North Korea’s parliament in March 2026, when he declared that the government “will continue to consolidate our absolutely irreversible status as a nuclear power.”
PARADIGM LOST
To effectively deal with North Korea, the United States must scrap the old approach of a single-minded focus on denuclearization and an overreliance on sanctions. Although many policymakers have implicitly accepted this idea, none will propose it publicly because insiders in Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo see it as equivalent to surrender. But the United States should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Denuclearization is a noble goal, but past policy failures and North Korea’s dogged determination to obtain weapons have made it unattainable for now. Washington needs to shift the logic of its strategy from disarming North Korea’s nukes to achieving immediate goals that will make the United States more secure against those weapons.
Protecting the U.S. homeland is the most pressing priority. Over the last 30 years, North Korea’s ability to target the United States has evolved from remote possibility to real danger. The range of some North Korean ICBMs extends to the continental United States, according to a 2025 report by the Defense Department and several U.S. intelligence agencies. Pyongyang already has enough launchers and missiles to overwhelm U.S. defenses. As the nuclear expert Ankit Panda has pointed out, North Korea’s 15 to 20 transporter erector mobile launchers, each armed with one ICBM, could deplete the entire U.S. stockpile of 44 ground-based interceptors deployed in Alaska and California that are designed to destroy these missiles midcourse. (Up to four interceptors are needed to defend from each missile.) The Defense Intelligence Agency has estimated that North Korea’s nuclear-tipped ICBM arsenal could grow to 50 within the next decade; this means that the United States would need to have at least 200 interceptors to fully protect itself from a potential North Korean attack. Current plans to add next-generation interceptors will increase that number to only 64 by 2035. As North Korea equips its ICBMs with decoy warheads to evade missile defenses or with multiple miniaturized nuclear warheads to overwhelm the system, the odds that the United States will be able to shield itself grow even worse. Starting conversations with North Korea to set limits on further testing, deployment, or proliferation of ballistic missiles and production of nuclear materials is necessary now, even if denuclearization remains a long-term goal.
Sanctions have only hardened Pyongyang’s resolve.
Washington also needs to reduce the number of adversaries it is dealing with. The United States faces a dizzying array of challenges from China, Russia, and Iran (and its proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis). U.S. defenses are stretched especially thin because of the war with Iran, and U.S. officials are moving some Patriot missiles, high-altitude antimissile systems, and drones stationed in South Korea to the Middle East to compensate. This puts a premium on what former Assistant Secretary of Defense Ely Ratner has described as “taking enemies off of the board.” Trump arguably tried to do this with North Korea during his first term by befriending Kim, but Washington’s singular focus on denuclearization precluded any serious discussion of test bans, arms control, or political relations. Restarting talks with the goal of establishing a cold peace will more immediately serve U.S. interests. Data collected by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) shows that periods of U.S.–North Korean dialogue correlate with fewer missile launches, nuclear tests, and military provocations.
The increasing risk of nuclear first use across Asia also necessitates rethinking U.S. policy toward North Korea. Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that he would use nuclear weapons first in any conflict, and China is embarking on a massive nuclear buildup that is ly to exceed 1,000 warheads by 2030. North Korea has also adopted a more offensive posture. Pyongyang announced in 2022 that it was willing to use nuclear weapons first in a conventional conflict; that it could use nuclear weapons based on warnings alone rather than in response to an adversary’s attack; and that it was preemptively delegating authority to launch nuclear weapons down the chain of command if a strike were to take out top leaders. North Korea increasingly believes that it may have to “use or lose” its nuclear weapons in a conflict with the United States or South Korea. Although North Korea doesn’t publicize its nuclear doctrine, a CSIS study of nuclear-related statements from the state news agency from 1998 to 2023 found a shift from a focus on defense (such as nuclear weapons to maintain deterrence) to offense (using them for tactical strikes during a war). The weakness of North Korea’s conventional military compared with the vastly more capable U.S. and South Korean forces only adds to Pyongyang’s incentives to rapidly escalate to nuclear conflict.
The United States has held off on establishing crisis management hotlines because it does not want to recognize North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons. But the United States must develop direct communication channels to avoid accidental escalation that could trigger a nightmare scenario. Currently, the United States can communicate with North Korea only via phone in the demilitarized zone at the border between North and South Korea (a phone that the North Koreans rarely answer) or by sliding letters under the door of North Korea’s office at the United Nations headquarters in New York, most of which are returned unopened. (In 2025, the Trump administration attempted to hand deliver a letter to the office; North Korean diplomats refused to accept it.) These methods are inadequate for staving off potential nuclear war.
To lower the risk of escalation, the United States could reaffirm its pledge to not use nuclear weapons first, which it made at the six-party talks. It could also encourage South Korea to tone down elements of its aggressive deterrence strategy, such as Seoul’s “kill chain” plan to preemptively take out North Korean nuclear facilities or threaten leadership decapitation. Instead, Washington and its allies could focus on what is known as deterrence by denial: a set of strategies that includes setting up high-density missile defenses, regularly rotating U.S. nuclear weapons–capable fighter jets and submarines to the Korean Peninsula, and threatening precise and advanced conventional military responses to North Korean attacks. By signaling strong allied retaliatory capabilities while downplaying offensive threats that could trigger a “use or lose” mindset in Pyongyang, the United States and its allies could deter North Korea without provoking it.
It is also in Washington’s interest to weaken North Korea’s ties with China and Russia. The growing closeness between Moscow and Pyongyang is particularly worrisome. The defense agreement that Russia signed with North Korea in 2024 reinstituted Moscow’s Cold War–era security guarantee to Pyongyang, which was removed from their friendship treaty after South Korea and the Soviet Union normalized relations in 1990. Russia is suspected of transferring high-end weapons technology, particularly for ICBMs and for nuclear submarines, to North Korea, which could allow Pyongyang’s arsenals to survive a preemptive attack and be used to retaliate. Moscow has also been helping bolster Pyongyang’s conventional military, munitions and drone industries, and missile systems. Chinese leader Xi Jinping, too, has increased his support of Kim. Beijing has been, in the words of Sydney Seiler, a former U.S. national intelligence officer for North Korea, “aggressively unhelpful” with Washington on coordinating policy toward North Korea. And Xi gave the North Korean leader equal billing alongside Putin on the diplomatic stage at China’s Victory Day parade in September 2025.
The United States needs to find some way to compel Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang to invest less in their relationships with each other. Although Washington may not be able to fully break these alliances apart, it can create some friction between them. It could offer positive inducements to North Korea or Russia, such as lifting sanctions, or amplify disinformation to generate distrust among the three countries. Or counterintuitively, the United States could try to trigger traditional North Korean fears of being entrapped by great powers by designating the Pyongyang-Moscow alliance as an enemy of NATO and European Union countries because of its contribution to Putin’s war in Ukraine. Stigmatizing North Korea in this way might encourage it to reconsider its relationships, since Europe was its main cultural and economic gateway to the West before the 2022 invasion and Kim may want to revive connections to the continent in the future. Leaders in Pyongyang have shown that they deeply fear overdependence on great powers: in the late 1950s, for instance, North Korea’s excessive economic reliance on the Soviet Union pushed Kim Il Sung to embrace Mao as a hedge, and Kim Jong Un’s dire need for Beijing’s help to circumvent UN sanctions influenced his decision to meet with Trump in 2019. American policymakers could also suggest that South Korea reconsider its indirect supplies of military equipment and ammunition to Ukraine in exchange for Russia distancing itself from North Korean war support, but this would not resonate well in Kyiv and other European capitals.
YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT
Managing the threats that North Korea presents and settling into a stable cold peace with Pyongyang requires coming to the negotiating table. But what the United States wants out of a negotiation is not the same as what North Korea wants. Given all the economic, political, and military support it receives from China and Russia, Pyongyang has far fewer incentives to concede anything to Washington than it did when Trump last met with Kim Jong Un, in 2019. Some of the traditional carrots that the United States could use to tempt compliance in the past have also lost their appeal. North Korea is no longer interested in exchanging liaison offices, which take on some of the basic functions of embassies. The regime previously wanted this exchange as a symbol of its legitimacy, but it now feels that such a move gives Washington too much access inside North Korea while providing little added value because it already has a UN office in New York.
What North Korea wants is reductions in U.S. troops on the Korean Peninsula, which Pyongyang rightly sees as the primary symbol of the alliance between Washington and Seoul. Although such a concession to North Korea would normally be a nonstarter for the two allies, the United States and South Korea are contemplating transformational changes to their security relationship that might naturally reduce the number of American troops there. The United States is encouraging South Korea to significantly increase its defense spending, take over control of wartime operations from Washington, and absorb more of the burden of peninsular defense. The United States wants to transition to a larger air and naval presence in the region while reducing its ground-based one; it also seeks to cooperate with South Korea on nuclear-powered submarines, space and intelligence surveillance, and artificial intelligence–driven warfare. U.S. media has reported the possibility that the United States may permanently remove a rotational brigade of 3,500 to 4,500 troops from South Korea. Although such changes should be seen as moves to strengthen the alliance, they can be aligned with negotiations with North Korea on other measures, including phased arms reductions, caps on the deployment of multiple rocket launchers, and no-fly zones for drones.
Any strategy to manage the North Korean threat must retain allied deterrence at its core. Governments in both Japan and South Korea are increasing defense spending to historic levels, improving joint military planning with the United States, operationalizing trilateral missile defenses, and working to bolster nuclear planning through channels such as the U.S.–South Korean Nuclear Consultative Group and the U.S.-Japanese Extended Deterrence Dialogue. But more can be done to deter North Korea from using its nuclear weapons first. American policy should declare clearly that any use of North Korean nuclear weapons would prompt the United States to destroy the regime immediately. To back this up, Japan, South Korea, and the United States should enact so-called next-phase missile defenses, which include seamless tracking between Japanese sea-based Aegis platforms and South Korean land-based THAAD systems; training to counter simultaneous attacks by ballistic missiles, low-altitude cruise missiles, and drone swarms; and joint production of more interceptors.
Ideally, all three allies would commit to a collective defense declaration so that an attack on any one of them would constitute an attack on all of them. Such an agreement would upset Pyongyang, but it will help shift dynamics toward a cold peace on the peninsula by signaling that any North Korean belligerence would be met with an exponentially larger response from the three allies. Such coordination would also help offset concerns from allies that a greater U.S. focus on its own expedient needs, such as reducing long-range missiles, would be interpreted as decreased concern about North Korea’s short-range missiles and artillery or a weakening U.S. security commitment that could threaten U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific. If allies feel abandoned and do not trust the U.S. security commitment, that could trigger a regional arms race and result in new nuclear dominoes falling.
THE LEAST BAD CHOICE
This new strategy is ly to prompt objections on the grounds that it de facto accepts North Korea’s status as a nuclear state. Critics will charge that after decades of insisting on denuclearization up front, the United States would be making major concessions without meaningful reciprocation from Pyongyang.
These critics might propose to threaten military action instead. The United States could demand that North Korea denuclearize or else face the same fate that Iran has—first in Operation Midnight Hammer, in June 2025, when the U.S. military dropped bunker-buster bombs to try to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, and then in this year’s U.S.-Israeli war on the Islamic Republic, which killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and many other top political leaders.
But North Korea is not Iran: it is a proven nuclear weapons state that could retaliate against the United States and its allies. North Korea’s nuclear programs and delivery systems are also far larger than those in Iran and more dispersed across undisclosed locations that are hard to target. These factors minimize the lihood that a preventive strike would succeed. In 1994, when Clinton considered a military strike, the United States might have been able to destroy Pyongyang’s fledgling program with minimal consequences. But today, North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is far too large to eliminate without risking devastation. And targeting weapons facilities near the border with China could lead to wider escalation with Beijing.
It was never North Korea’s intention to get rid of its nuclear weapons.
Even the slightest sign of U.S. military action could trigger a dangerous escalation. There is no guarantee that the threat of being obliterated by the United States would deter Kim from acting. Koreans have a famous phrase—“If I die, you die, we all die”—that permeates their films, novels, and history. No American president in good conscience could put the odds of avoiding escalation at better than 50 percent, which are poor odds for a nuclear war that could destroy U.S. cities and kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Critics may also call for ramping up economic and financial sanctions on North Korea. Targeting its trade, cryptocurrency, and financial flows could cause significant pain to political and military leaders, compel them to the negotiating table to seek relief, or even create enough chaos to accelerate the regime’s collapse. Although sanctions can be one tool that the United States uses, their effectiveness has decreased. China and Russia, which previously backed the UN sanctions regime against North Korea, are now undercutting it. Russia has used its veto to strike down the UN Security Council resolution authorizing the council’s sanctions enforcement body, and Chinese bilateral trade with North Korea is at historic highs: it grew by 25 percent from 2024 to 2025. Although North Korea and Russia have not been regularly reporting bilateral trade figures since the start of the Ukraine war, commercial satellite imagery shows that port, land, and railway crossings with North Korea are teeming with new trade and construction activity. North Korea has also shown that it can function even when cut off from the world. It closed the border with China, its top trading partner, for over three years during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, which further belies the argument that sanctions will force Pyongyang into submission.
Negotiators are fond of saying that when it comes to North Korea’s nuclear portfolio, there are only lousy options. If North Korea were not already loaded with nuclear weapons, there might be better choices available. What the United States faces in reality, however, is the need for an interim solution to protect U.S. homeland security and prevent nuclear escalation in the Indo-Pacific. A cold peace is hardly an ideal solution, but it could bring much-needed stability to an increasingly dangerous relationship.
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