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North Korea passed a law this month putting into effect Kim Jong Un's decision that in case he is incapacitated by foreign hands, the country will “automatically and immediately” launch a nuclear retaliation. This arrangement makes it sound as though the North Korean nuclear arsenal is not only designed to be used by one man but exists to keep that one man in power.
Is this arrangement an aberration of North Korea, or is it descriptive of the other eight nuclear states? As tensions persist — Russia's war in Ukraine, but also between India and Pakistan, the U.S. and China, the U.S. and North Korea — how strong are the nuclear nations' guardrails?
While some nuclear leaders (including a recent U.S. president) go to great lengths to keep themselves in office, it seems improbable that any of them would regard their own individual lives as something that should be paid for by 2 billion or 5 billion human lives — the numbers of deaths that recent research on nuclear winter shows will result from a small or large nuclear war.
But what the North Korean law accurately foregrounds is the monarchic power that these weapons have brought about within the nine nuclear states. Each has an…
