John Parker has thought long and hard about North Korea’s admission that it has nuclear weapons and come up with a solution he believes will checkmate the North’s nuclear threat and could lead to the collapse of Kim’s regime. That solution is for the United States to reintroduce tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea.

The usual suspects would be apoplectic, but they can be ignored: A similar move by the Reagan Administration in West Germany hastened the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and nuclear deterrence, while risky, has been effective in the past.

He seems to have covered all the angles, and his article in the Asia Times explaining his reasoning is absorbing. Some excerpts:

. . .rampant anti-American sentiment in South Korea has eviscerated the ROK army’s will to fight, making it dangerously vulnerable to a DPRK attack (this assertion will be controversial, but it is based on firsthand accounts from US Forces Korea – USFK- soldiers who train with ROK soldiers).

North Korea’s war strategy, as revealed by the high-level defector Hwang Jeong-yeop, is not merely to overrun the South so rapidly that reinforcement would become impossible. . . Rather, the DPRK’s strategy is to prevent reinforcement from ever taking place by threatening to use nuclear weapons against Japan, should the US intervene (this very possibility is a major, though little-understood reason why relations between Tokyo and Pyongyang have been so frigid of late).

. . . certain segments of the South Korean public, especially its astoundingly gullible younger generation, would hysterically oppose any such suggestion . . . most South Korean government officials, in contrast to their naive offspring, are realistic enough to recognize that their continuance in power ultimately depends on American military protection.

China basically has two goals in Northeast Asia: to avoid another Korean War, especially a nuclear one, and to avert a nuclear arms race in the region that could result in Japan, or – God forbid – Taiwan becoming nuclear states. While China doesn’t want the humiliation of having its erstwhile North Korean ally absorbed by the democratic South, that doesn’t mean it wants to prop up the DPRK at the cost of losing Taiwan, and a nuclear DPRK could have precisely that result.

. . .if not for strategic advantage, why did the North proceed with its nuclear program? And there can only be one answer: for the same reason states such as Israel and South Africa did – the need for self-preservation at any cost. The North Korean regime has always had two paramount goals: self-preservation, and reunification under its own terms. When the DPRK decided, during the (US president) Bill Clinton administration, to secretly pursue uranium enrichment . . . it faced a fork in the road: it could attain self-preservation, but only by placing the second goal in the highest jeopardy, since reintroduction of nuclear weapons to the South, resulting in a nuclear stalemate on the peninsula, would make reunification militarily unattainable. And Kim Jong-il didn’t hesitate: he chose regime survival over the hope of reunification.

This is what is so ironic about the doltish reaction of some South Korean youth to the North’s nuclear program, who cheered the North’s warheads on the grounds that “they are Korean”: by going nuclear, Kim Jong-il made a mockery of the DPRK’s entire ideology, which holds that reunification is the highest goal of the nation.

It’s so good I could quote the entire piece. Instead, I suggest you read it yourself here.