In 1969, Richard Nixon, about eight months into his Presidency, grew frustrated with the North Vietnamese leadership. The President wanted to negotiate an exit from the Vietnam War, but his adversary’s terms were unyielding. Nixon thought that he needed the Soviet Union to pressure North Vietnam; he also believed that Leonid Brezhnev would act only if he was convinced that the U.S. was about to do something crazy.
In late October, Nixon ordered an operation code-named Giant Lance. B-52 bombers loaded with atomic weapons took off from bases in California and Washington State and headed toward the Soviet Union, then flew in loops above the polar ice cap. Nixon’s hope was that Soviet intelligence would interpret the action as an immediate, and utterly insane, threat of nuclear attack.
The “madman nuclear alert,” as the political scientist Scott D. Sagan and the historian Jeremi Suri called it in a 2003 article, remained secret for years.
H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, recounted in his memoir how his boss described the tactic. “I call it the Madman Theory,” Nixon once told him. “We’ll just slip the word to them that ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button.’ ”
In the history of nuclear diplomacy, no nation-state has ever given up atomic weapons in response to shrill threats. In a number of instances, however, countries have been coaxed to mothball their nuclear programs in exchange for political and economic returns.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus voluntarily gave up their nuclear weapons or abandoned advanced programs.
However, sometimes leaders hold on to nukes because they fear that without them as a deterrent their countries might be invaded or destroyed. (That largely explains why Israel and Pakistan have kept theirs.) Kim Jong Un may well worry that if he gives up his nuclear weapons his regime will be overthrown.
In 2011, NATO members and other nations intervened to protect a popular uprising in Libya. Evan Osnos stated he heard repeatedly in Pyongyang in his recent reporting for The New Yorker, the lesson for North Korea was clear: if you surrender a nuclear deterrent, you embolden your enemies.
To apply some version of the Madman Theory to the North Korean problem, however, is foolish. The nuclear alert that Nixon attempted in 1969 was “ineffective and dangerous,” It is not clear if Brezhnev even understood what Nixon was trying to communicate.
Trump and his advisers talk loosely about preparing for a “military option” against North Korea. By this they seem by some to mean a preëmptive war, even though military analysts believe that such a conflict would claim more than a million lives in South Korea in its opening phase, while also exposing American cities to the possibility of a nuclear attack.
If Kim Jong Un believes that Trump is rash enough to initiate a first strike, he may accelerate his missile and nuclear-bomb tests and deployments. North Korea’s missile-testing binge this year has increased the odds of an accident. One of Kim’s rockets could veer off course and kill civilians in Japan or elsewhere. The result of such a calamity could conceivably be a war.
Trump’s other foray into global nuclear diplomacy—his apparent intention to tear up or to unilaterally renegotiate the Iran nuclear accord which if rejected could possibly not only encourage the worst elements in Iranian politics; it may also undermine U.S. relations with Russia, China, and European countries just when their coöperation is needed to pressure North Korea.