Pyongyang’s recent ICBM tests could transform the strategic theater. There are growing concerns and skepticism that the international community has no good policy options to stop North Korea’s nuclear and missile development. However, it still has more things to do. Most important at this moment is sanctions.

Such stances could allow North Korea to entrench its global business networks and increase their sophistication and scale. North Korea shamelessly made a global appeal for 192 U.N. member states to reconsider enforcing U.N. sanctions in May. Japan and like-minded countries should organize and carry out a campaign to urge member states to seriously recognize the threat posed by North Korea and eliminate its illicit worldwide activities through the full implementation of the U.N. sanctions.

Second, the international community should also apply new and tougher sanctions. One of the most effective is secondary sanctions against those who do business with Pyongyang. In 2005, the United States designated Banco Delta Asia, a Macau-based bank, to be a “primary money laundering concern.” The designation required U.S. banks to ensure that its customers were not conducting business transactions with Banco Delta Asia. The bank was frozen out the U.S. financial system overnight. In addition to this direct effect, other non-U.S. financial institutions severed their ties with North Korea, not wanting to risk entanglement in North Korean illicit activities and face possible expulsion from the globally dominant U.S. financial market. That had a significant impact on the Kim regime.

In June, the U.S. Treasury Department designated China’s Bank of Dandong a primary money-laundering concern. More banks should be targeted if it’s found they have illicit dealings with North Korea.

Also important is global action against North Korean “guest workers.” More than 50,000 North Koreans work in China, Russia, South East Asia and elsewhere with the aim of circumventing U.N. sanctions and earning hard currency. The host countries should shut down that flow of cash into the North Korean dictator’s pockets.

To really pressure North Korea, China can cut off its oil supply. In 2003, China closed an oil pipeline supplying North Korea for three days. A few month later, North Korea joined the six-party talks. An article by the Global Times, a Communist Party-affiliated newspaper, in April argued that Beijing should limit its oil exports if North Korea conducts another nuclear test. Since then, North Korea has yet to conduct a nuclear weapon test.

Without Chinese oil, North Korea could not survive on its own. Beijing worries about the impact a collapse of the North Korean economy and the ensuing instability would have on China, such as massive influx of refugees from North Korea. It also worries that it eventually could result in a final act of suicidal nuclear defiance by Kim.

Beijing is also worried that its influence on Pyongyang might be further eroded as Kim’s regime has been trying to reduce its dependence on China through an expansion of trade with Russia and Southeast Asia. Russia appears to have replaced China as the top supplier of jet fuel to North Korea following China’s suspension of such exports in 2013. If China restricts its oil exports to North Korea, Russia may fill the gap. These are China’s dilemmas and present a challenge for the international community in its effort to work together toward denuclearization. In a nutshell, the probability of the next nuclear test depends upon Kim’s calculation on this dilemma.

China’s trade with North Korea rose more than 10 percent in the first half of 2017 from a year earlier. Earlier China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said that as a neighboring country of North Korea, China has maintained “normal” economic relations and trade. However, Beijing’s policy to decouple the denuclearization issue from its relationship with North Korea is no longer relevant and even undermines China’s security interests. Skepticism about China’s pressure on North Korea is also increasing in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Beijing is beginning to view the Trump administration’s policy of pressuring North Korea as inconsistent. U.S. President Donald Trump once said that “all options are on the table,” and had put on a show of force by sending the Carl Vinson carrier strike group to the waters off the Korea Peninsula, but that military pressure soon subsided.

Although it is important to apply continued economic and diplomatic pressure on North Korea, that will not be enough to compel the Kim regime to freeze and eventually abandon its nuclear program. Military pressure will also be critical.

The U.S. should show its determination and capability as the strongest military power in the world to Kim until negotiations are underway.

In this regard, almost all experts argue that a preemptive strike against North Korea is virtually untenable unless a North Korean attack is eminent. This observation is reasonable and widely held, but such assertions by smart pundits are unhelpful for levying meaningful pressure on Kim. They must recognize that the U.S. is playing a game of chicken with a ruthless dictator. To eliminate an impending threat, some risk must be taken. Otherwise, the threat will become increasingly bigger as the lesson of the 1938 Munich Agreement shows. That’s the dilemma we are facing now.

If Kim sniffs an element of bluff or a bravado in the U.S. effort to apply military pressure, it will never work. Then China won’t draw the short straw by taking tougher actions against North Korea. The strategic cooperative posture emerged at the summit meeting between Trump and Xi in April turned out a short-lived illusion.

Now we face the danger of Kim’s increasing military confidence, which raises the risks of increased belligerence. The international community must be united in increasing diplomatic, economic and military pressure on Pyongyang. These are an essential and minimum prerequisite for any future negotiations with North Korea.

The world’s nuclear club — the United States, Britain, Russia, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan and, most recently, North Korea — boycotted the talks, arguably dooming them to failure. Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in March that Washington couldn’t allow “bad actors” to have nuclear weapons and “those of us that are good, trying to keep peace and safety, not to have them.

A joint statement by the United States, Britain and France on July 7 said the ban “disregards the realities of the international security environment.” As a result, all countries that rely on the nuclear deterrent either stayed away (including South Korea), voted against the ban (the Netherlands) or abstained (Singapore).

Japan’s absence from the talks was striking. The U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, which are estimated to have killed or wounded more than 200,000 people, mostly civilians, remain the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare, giving Japan considerable moral heft in any discussion on abolition.

Tokyo’s disarmament ambassador, Nobushige Takamizawa, lamented in March at the beginning of negotiations that while his country would “continue to pursue realistic and effective” disarmament measures, “regrettably” it was unable to join the talks.

 

The decision appalled Japan’s hibakusha, the dwindling survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings. Toshiki Fujimori, assistant secretary-general of Nihon Hidankyo, an organization for atomic bomb victims, said it left him “heartbroken.” Fujimori was little more than a year old when the bomb exploded over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

Terumi Tanaka, former director of Hidankyo, says he believes diplomatic pressure was brought to bear on Japanese officials.

“Up until the day before the negotiation convened, the minister of foreign affairs showed an intent to attend the negotiations but, in the end, he didn’t,” Tanaka said. “I think there was influence from the Prime Minister’s Office not to go.”

Japan has for decades acknowledged the anti-nuclear cause while sheltering under the U.S. defense umbrella. The nation’s so-called three non-nuclear principles, outlined by Prime Minister Eisaku Sato and formally adopted in 1971, state that Japan shall neither possess nor produce nuclear weapons, nor shall it permit their introduction into Japanese territory.

 

“Japan is the only country in the world to have suffered the ravages of atomic bombing,” said Sato, accepting the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the efforts toward nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. “That experience left an indelible mark on the hearts of our people, making them passionately determined to renounce all wars.”

However, those noble sentiments were not safe from the Cold War calculations needed to maintain the facade of pacifism in a heavily nuclearized neighborhood, when the Soviet Union and then China acquired their own deterrents against what they saw as potential U.S. aggression.

Japan’s no-nuke rule was undermined by a backroom deal struck between Washington and Tokyo, signed by Sato and President Richard Nixon in 1969. The deal allowed the possibility that nuclear-armed U.S. ships and aircraft traffic anywhere through or over Japanese territory for decades.

 

Politicians on both sides of the Pacific repeatedly denied the deal. In February 2016, Washington finally admitted what had almost become an open secret — that nuclear weapons were stored in Okinawa in Japan’s far south before its reversion to Japanese rule in May 1972. The secret agreement allowed for their re-introduction without prior Japanese consent in times of crisis.

Japan’s abstention from this year’s U.N. conference, therefore, did not come out of the blue. In 1998, it declined to sign a U.N. resolution against no first use of a nuclear weapon. Washington has historically maintained the right to a preemptive strike. Attempts to end the policy are typically condemned as liberal naivete.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appears to agree. Last year, shortly after standing beside U.S. President Barack Obama on his historic visit to Hiroshima, Abe reportedly expressed “concern” that the United States was weighing whether or not to end its policy of no first use. Abe warned Adm. Harry Harris Jr., head of the U.S. Pacific Command, that deterrence against North Korea would suffer as a result, according to a report in The Washington Post, a report that has not been denied.

Japanese officials rarely discuss such nuclear issues publicly — hardly surprising given their unpopularity: Just 5 percent of Japanese people said they wanted their country to possess nuclear weapons in a poll conducted by think tank Genron in 2016. In South Korea, by contrast, the figure is consistently over 50 percent.

A senior Japanese defense official, speaking off the record owing to the sensitivity of the issue, said whatever his personal feelings, the “reality” is that as part of Japan’s alliance with the United States, the nuclear deterrent is necessary.

“We share the view that we should have a peaceful and stable world without nuclear weapons, but can we one-sidedly do away with them?” the official asked. “If someone has nuclear weapons, they must believe in them.”

The contradictions of Japan’s position, however — acknowledging domestic sentiment on nuclear weapons while supporting the United States’ right to deploy and use them — are likely to become more glaring as tensions in East Asia grow.

As the Cold War eased following the fall of Soviet communism, U.S. President George Bush almost halved America’s nuclear stockpile, withdrawing tactical nukes from ships and submarines across Asia in 1991. His son, George W. Bush, cut the global stockpile again.

China’s growing economic and military clout and, since 2006, the entry of North Korea into the group of nuclear powers have helped convince Pentagon planners that such moves may have been premature. The shifting U.S. defense policy puts Japan in a difficult position as it tries to deal with three nuclear-armed states on its doorstep.

Bush’s “liberal” successor, Barack Obama, authorized “the largest expansion of funding on nuclear weapons since the fall of the Soviet Union,” said the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, a Washington think tank, in September 2014. The $1 trillion splurge puts the world on track for a 21st-century arms race, it warned.

Washington will not rule out a first-strike option against China, says Gregory Kulacki, a China specialist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a think tank.

“(China) has been asking that for 10 years, and we won’t give it to them,” Kulacki says.

Since building its first nuclear bomb in 1964, Beijing has repeatedly reaffirmed a no first-use policy.

The Pentagon’s Strategic Command, meanwhile, which was charged with obliterating the Soviet Union during the Cold War, is working on a new evaluation to determine “whether the Russian and Chinese leadership could survive a nuclear strike and keep operating,” the Bloomberg news agency reported.

Critics say the “modernization” of U.S. nuclear forces is code for a technological leap, increasing America’s capacity to fight and win a nuclear war.

“This increase in capability is astonishing — boosting the overall killing power of existing U.S. ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three,” says a paper in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in March. That, in turn, encourages America’s enemies to keep their own fingers on the trigger, the paper’s authors say.

These developments make Japan’s long-standing duality increasingly untenable, Kulacki says.

Historically, he says, there have been two sets of Japanese voices on U.S. nuclear weapons policy. The first, reflecting the majority of the Japanese public, “is strongly opposed to the use of U.S. nuclear weapons in the defense of Japan.”

 

The second, Kulacki says, “is a small and secretive group of bureaucrats in Japan’s defense and foreign policy institutions who may have different views.” Alarmed by China’s territorial claims to much of East Asia, as well as North Korea’s five nuclear tests, these bureaucrats are working harder to reverse the Bush legacy, he says.

“They have made a sustained effort to have U.S. tactical nuclear weapons redeployed in Asia,” Kulacki says. In addition, he says, the once-taboo notion of “tailored nuclear options” has growing support on both sides of the Pacific.

For tailored, read “usable.”

“(Bureaucrats) believe that a credible threat to use nuclear weapons first or preemptively is necessary for maintaining the credibility of the U.S. nuclear deterrent in Asia,” Kulacki says.

Defense officials in Japan will neither confirm nor deny these claims. Noboru Yamaguchi, a retired lieutenant general with the Japan Ground Self-Defense Forces, who supports the modernization of America’s nuclear arsenal, says tactical nukes in East Asia “don’t make any sense.”

“Tactical nuclear weapons used to be a good tool to compensate for inferiority in conventional arms,” Yamaguchi says. “Not any longer — we are conventionally superior. In this region, the U.S. Navy and Japanese Navy have always been superior to any other navy, including the Chinese or the Soviets, so there is no need to rely on such weapons.”

Ramesh Thakur, director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament at the Australian National University and author of “Nuclear Weapons and International Security,” calls such a strategy a seductive illusion.

“The limited utility of nuclear weapons rests on the certainty of nuclear retaliation, not in any belief in its first use,” Thakur says. “First-use posture is a Cold War deterrence legacy whose logic breaks down once nuclear weapons are used and the empirical reality is transformed from peacetime deterrence … to fighting an actual war.”

Thakur is “skeptical” of the strength and influence of pro-nuclear officials in the Japanese national security bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the distance between them and mainstream thinking in the government appears to have narrowed under Abe, Thakur says.

Some analysts note, for example, that Shotaro Yachi, a key Abe aide, was a disciple of Kei Wakaizumi, the diplomat who negotiated the secret deal with Nixon in 1969. Wakaizumi is believed to have been a “realist” who wanted to end Japan’s “insular pacifism” and over-reliance on U.S. military protection, says Giulio Pugliese, a lecturer in war studies in King’s College London.

 

That said, Japan is very unlikely to go so far as to start building its own nuclear arsenal for protection, despite Donald Trump telling The New York Times while running for U.S. president last year that it might not be such a “bad thing” if Japan (and South Korea) developed nuclear weapons.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden had also played a similar card last year. “What happens if Japan, who could go nuclear tomorrow? They have the capacity to do it virtually overnight,” Biden told Chinese President Xi Jinping in June 2016.

While few doubt that Japan has the required capital, technology and raw materials, there is more to joining the nuclear club than that, says Alessio Patalano, a reader in East Asian warfare and security at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.

“You need civil-military relations set up, command and control, a national security council,” Patalano says. “And you need political confidence to understand the complexity of how to use nuclear weapons.”

Another obstacle is popular opposition — merely floating the idea of a nuclear weapon would most likely be tantamount to political suicide — and the certainty that it would trigger a regional arms race.

Whatever the thinking, tactical nuclear weapons in East Asia would be a disaster, says Thakur, ratcheting up tensions with China and North Korea and potentially spooking Kim Jong-un into launching a preemptive strike on Seoul if he fears imminent U.S. attack.

“Remember, Pyongyang has been living with hair-trigger sensitivity and preparing for a U.S. attack for decades,” Thakur says. “A nuclear umbrella may offer protection of the great and powerful ally, but any actual use ceases to be protective and instead morphs into the most catastrophically self-destructive security guarantee imaginable.”