Earlier this month, North Korea claimed that for the fifth time it had successfully tested a nuclear weapon. Countries including the United States, Japan and South Korea have condemned the test, describing it as a threat to the world’s stability.

The Daily Orange spoke with Matthew Bunn, a professor of practice at Harvard University with a research focus on nuclear energy, about North Korea’s latest test and the future of nuclear weapons across the globe.

The Daily Orange: Is there reason to worry about North Korea as a legitimate nuclear threat?

Matthew Bunn: Of course. North Korea is one of the most extreme dictatorial regimes in the world. They routinely threaten to turn South Korea and sometimes the United States into a “sea of fire.” They’re working on ballistic missiles that would be capable of carrying nuclear weapons that could probably already threaten all of South Korea. They’re working on missiles to threaten the United States. They routinely conduct provocations, from sinking a ship to shelling an island, et cetera. I’d say it’s probably going to be the top nuclear risk the next president is going to have to cope with.

The D.O.: Speaking of the next president, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has sometimes on the campaign trail seemed to express an openness to nuclear weapons. What do you think of his position?

M.B.: His position on nuclear weapons is totally incoherent and to the extent it exists is contrary to the bipartisan consensus that has existed for 50 years. He is actively questioning whether we will be there to defend our allies, and actively saying it would be OK for our allies to develop nuclear weapons of their own to protect themselves. And that is completely contrary to the policy that both Republican and Democratic presidents have been pursuing for half a century, or more.

But more to the point, I think that the reality is there are still a lot of nuclear dangers in this world. And the next president is going to have to cope with them, and that’s going to require very sober presidential judgment. And as far as I can tell, there’s only one of the two (major party) candidates running who has ever shown any sober judgment in real international crises, so I think it’s a dangerous world that the next president is going to have to cope with on the nuclear front and other fronts. Voters need to seriously think about what they actually think about the judgment or the impulsiveness of one candidate versus the other.

If you look at the Cuban missile crisis, a strong majority of Kennedy’s advisers were telling him he needed to conduct airstrikes followed by an invasion. And we now know there were already nuclear weapons in the country, which we did not know at the time. And had that advice been followed, we probably would have had a nuclear war and our civilization might no longer exist. So the fact that Kennedy was the president that he was, made a big, big difference.

The D.O.: Along with North Korea, where else across the world do you see nuclear threats?

M.B.: There’s a whole set of nuclear dangers facing the world at the moment. You have in North Korea an unpredictable dictator armed with a couple dozen nuclear weapons that are a growing nuclear stockpile, trying to extend the range of his missiles to be able to reach the United States. …

Also in Pakistan you have some of the world’s most capable terrorists in the same place with the world’s fastest growing nuclear arsenal, which raises concerns.

You have terrorists who in the past have pursued nuclear weapons, like al-Qaida, and we don’t know — we have some hints of nuclear interest of the Islamic State, but we don’t know they have the focused nuclear weapons program like the kind al-Qaida had. But if they did turn to nuclear weapons, they have more money, more territory, more control, more people, more ability to recruit experts globally than al-Qaida at its strongest had.

You have Iran, which while … the nuclear deal greatly reduces the risks imposed by its nuclear program for the near-term, there are a lot of issues about whether that deal will survive and many of its restraints expire over eight to 15 years after the deal went into effect. And there’s going to be a lot of action needed to make sure the deal keeps working and to figure out what to do after those key restraints expire.

In the case of the United States and Russia, we still have thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other. And it’s a more dangerous and conflict-prone relationship than we’ve had in 30 years. …

Barack Obama, oddly, he is both the president who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his soaring disarm in rhetoric and the president who has laid out literally a $1 trillion program to revitalize every respect of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. So there’s a lot on the nuclear agenda.

Published on September 19, 2016 at 10:01 pm

Contact Michael: mdburk01@syr.edu