Graham Allison, an assistant secretary of defense during the Clinton administration and a professor of international relations who is probably best known for his book on decision-making during the Cuban missile crisis had a piece in WaPo yesterday (Deterring Kim Jong Il) wherein he argues that we need to deter North Korea in the same way that President Kennedy deterred the Soviets from using Cuba as a nuclear launching point:

Here, the president can take a page from President John F. Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis. In 1962, as the Soviet Union was emplacing nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba, some worried that these weapons could be transferred to a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro. Kennedy issued an unambiguous warning to Nikita Khrushchev. “It shall be the policy of this nation,” he announced, “to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” Khrushchev knew that meant a nuclear war.

There is something to all of that, as we all well know that deterrence was the hallmark of policies preventing nuclear war during the Cold War. Of course whether it works the same under the current structure of the international system raises its own set of questions that I will not get into now.

What I find amusing about the Allison piece, however, is that Charles Krauthammer wrote practically the same piece (What Will Stop North Korea) two weeks ago, with the JFK quote and everything.

I am not suggesting Allison cribbed Krauthammer, but you would think that the WaPo op/ed editors would have noticed the similarities and asked Allison to write something else. Who need re-run on the editorial page?

Update: James Joyner comments on the Allison piece and points out two salient flaws with the argument.

I especially agree with this (something that I mentally noted when I read Krauthammer’s piece, but never blogged:

Second, it is simply not credible to think that we would use nuclear weapons against Pyongyang if some third party to whom they sold nuclear weapons used them against an American city. Making the threat would simultaneously fail to deter Kim and lower our esteem in the international community. Far better to simply make it known that a nuclear attack on the United States or its allies would be met in kind against the perpetrator.

It all sounds good: trace the weapons back to the source. However, wiping out cities is a difficult thing to do under any circumstance (one would like to think), and especially when the city in question is not linked to the direct and immediate source of the attack.

Another major problem here with applying the logic deterrence (even with James’ formulation) is that if a terrorists group used a nuclear device, the capacity to strike back at the attackers might not exist, because the group in question might be stateless.

Indeed, this raises a tangential point: after Afghanistan, one wonders if al Qaeda or like groups actually are seeking a new territorial base from which to operate (as is often assumed to be their goal in Iraq), or if they will seek decentralization. It seems to me that they would be smarter to eschew a clear territorial connection, as having such a base of operations makes retaliation possible.

People may talk about punishing the North Koreans for what al Qaeda might do, but no only are their serious questions of justice in such a move, there are also real questions of whether such a policy would deter anybody at all.

The Cuba-USSR analogy really doesn’t hold here, as those were a) two states, and b) it was a clear political-military alliance. The lines of cooperation were obvious and clear and so direct threats of retaliation made sense. In the shadowy world of terrorism such connections are not as easy as columnists make them sound.