Nuclear weapons have a great influence on international politics as well as national policies in their own countries. and The fact that a country has nuclear weapons alone is considerable in political and military power. Japan, which had resisted unti...
Nuclear weapons have a great influence on international politics as well as national policies in their own countries. and The fact that a country has nuclear weapons alone is considerable in political and military power. Japan, which had resisted until the end when nuclear bombs were detonated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, eventually declared unconditional surrender. It is no exaggeration to say that the pattern of world politics and war has changed since the development of nuclear weapons. Therefore, it is divided into nuclear-armed and non-nuclear countries as the NPT system was ratified in 1970 to prevent the horizontal spread of nuclear weapons amid concerns that humans may be destroyed by nuclear war. The NPT system was maintained to this day, and in 1995, it was decided to be extended indefinitely. However, unlike international efforts, North Korea’s behavior was different.
It is no exaggeration to say that countries around the world have joined the NPT, except for some countries. North Korea joined the NPT in 1985 and withdrew in 2003. In 2006, just three years later, the first nuclear test was carried out. Until the Kim Jong-il period, the international community focused on the possibility of North Korea's denuclearization, including the six-party talks, and actively cooperated. However, since Kim Jong-un took power in 2012, North Korea’s nuclear activities have developed differently from the past Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il periods.
With Kim Jong-un in power, North Korea’s nuclear weapons show many policy differences in whether to disclose and utilize nuclear weapons compared to past administrations. Of course, there were two nuclear tests during the Kim Jong-il era, but Kim Jong-un’s “economic construction and nuclear force parallelism” in 2013 did not directly mention nuclear weapons in policy, nor did he specifically mention the use of nuclear weapons by reflecting them and legislating them. Therefore, I thought it was necessary to discuss North Korea’s nuclear policy, which is actually recognized as a nuclear power, focusing on the Kim Jong-un era.
In the policies announced by North Korea since Kim Jong-un took power in 2012, policies on nuclear weapons always appear. Starting with the “Economic Construction and Nuclear Weapons Parallel Route” in 2013, the “Completion of Nuclear Weapons” in 2017 and the revision of the Nuclear Act in 2022, it seems to be completed with a certain flow of policy. In particular, North Korea begins its policy decisions and actions by presenting national goals such as the party convention of the Workers’ Party of Korea and the plenary session of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea. Even if these actions involve consequences, the results are chosen to maximize the interests and utility of the state, which is similar to the rational model of policy theory. Therefore, the ‘Reasonable actor model’, the first model of the Allison type used in international relations and international politics, was based on the ‘Reasonable actor model’, which was used as a tool to analyze the actual case behavior of the Cuban missile crisis between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It is also very similar to the North Korean policy-making environment, which is a prerequisite for the ‘Reasonable actor model’. The flow of the analysis frame was composed of ‘Background, Goa, Behavior, Result, Selection’, and the variable relationship of each item was analyzed. For a detailed analysis of North Korea’s nuclear policy decision process, three periods were analyzed separately from April 2023 after Kim Jong-un took power in 2012. First, the period of nuclear development(2012∼2017), Second, the period of nuclear power promotion(2018∼2019), and Third, the period of nuclear weapons advancement(2020∼2023. April). As a result of the analysis framework, ‘Background, Goal, Behavior’ could predict behavior by knowing the goal by maintaining a certain expected variable, but it did not necessarily involve the goal, and it was found that goal achievement was more affected by the result than the cause of choice. The choice also served as a bridge to the cycle involving another goal. These studies were able to analyze the flow of North Korea's nuclear policy decision-making process in macro and detailed dimensions after Kim Jong-un took power, and to identify variables that transform policy decisions at a detailed level.