The mineshaft gap

US rhetoric towards North Korea has certainly ramped up in the last 24 hours, with President Trump fulminating from the boardroom of his New Jersey golf course about America's ability to rain down "fire and fury" unless Pyonyang gets out of the nuclear arms business.  The trigger for the harsher language seems to be a report that US military intelligence believes that North Korea has already managed to miniaturize a warhead that can be fitted atop one of its new ICBMs.

That's quite a change from the confident posturing just a month or two ago, when the same intelligence sources were still expressing the view that a meaningful nuclear threat to the US mainland was still at least five years away.  Those of us with long memories of the Cold War might be just a touch sceptical about all this.

The sainted John F. Kennedy fought the 1960 election in part on the charge that President Eisenhower was weak on national defence. He claimed that the USSR had a huge advantage over the US in nuclear missile capacity -- the so-called "missile gap".  There never was any such gap, and there's plenty of evidence that JFK knew this perfectly well, but it served its purpose during the campaign, in which he narrowly defeated Richard Nixon.  

The whole issue was mordantly satirized by Stanley Kubrick in Dr Strangelove.  The good doctor's plan for surviving a post-nuclear future is to assemble a group of the best and the brightest, naturally including Strangelove himself, in mineshafts.  The deranged General Buck Turgidson worries that the USSR is ahead on that front too: "Mr President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!"

Despite the bloodcurdling rhetoric out of Pyongyang, there is no doubt that any gap in armaments (or mineshafts) between North Korea and the United States massively favours the latter.  There is little likelihood that Kim Jong-Un would seriously contemplate using any of his arsenal for a first strike -- even an attack against Guam, which the North Korean military has specifically threatened, would prompt a devastating response. Kim may be bad and dangerous to know, but he is probably not mad.

What about the US, which is still the only country ever to have used a nuclear weapon in combat? Plans for a pre-emptive strike are no doubt at an advanced stage, but it remains a remote possibility, given the amount of conventional weaponry that North Korea has in place, aimed directly at Seoul.  The tough rhetoric, from the President itself as well as Defense Secretary Mattis, is more likely intended to bring the North Koreans to the negotiating table -- and, equally, to convince China that the time has come to put serious pressure on its neighbour to do so.

President Trump, for whom nothing on the domestic front has gone right lately, may also feel that tough talk will stand him in good stead with his domestic voters.  He's probably right about that, as long as he doesn't inadvertently spark an actual war.  Presidents Johnson and Nixon, over Vietnam, and George W Bush, over Iraq, soon found that actual combat was not a sure-fire way to win voter popularity.