Stop pretending we can disarm North Korea

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Five weeks into a war with Iran, the United States is pulling THAAD missile defense batteries off the Korean Peninsula and shipping them to the Middle East.

While at it, the one country in the world actively building nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles aimed at American cities is watching Washington strip away the very systems meant to shoot them down — because those systems are needed more urgently somewhere else. If you wanted a single image to capture the bankruptcy of America’s North Korea policy, this is it.

Let’s start with what should no longer be debatable: North Korea is a nuclear state. Not aspiring, not threshold, not emerging — nuclear. The Federation of American Scientists estimates Pyongyang has assembled roughly 50 warheads, with enough fissile material for up to 90. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said in January that the North is producing material for 10 to 20 additional weapons annually. Kim Jong Un told the Ninth Congress of the Worker’s Party in February 2026 that he would “strengthen the national nuclear force on an annual basis.” At the same congress, he announced plans to expand the means and operational space for nuclear deployment, and pledged continuous tests and drills. None of this is ambiguous.

And yet the official policy of the United States and South Korea remains denuclearization — the same goal enshrined in the Singapore and Hanoi frameworks that collapsed years ago. In February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun reaffirmed it in a joint statement, as if sheer repetition could will it into relevance. Meanwhile, Kim declared in September 2025 that the concept of denuclearization has “already lost its meaning.” He’s not wrong. Not because denuclearization is undesirable, but because insisting on it as a precondition for talks guarantees there will be no talks at all.

The dangerous part isn’t the bombs. It’s the gap between what Pyongyang has become and what Washington pretends it still is. As Marialaura De Angelis of the Pacific Forum wrote in an April 2026 policy brief, one side remains anchored to long-dead denuclearization frameworks while the other has transitioned to a new strategic mindset as an established nuclear power. That gap is where miscalculation lives. And the Iran war is blowing it wide open.

Consider what’s happening in real time. On Feb. 28, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggering a massive retaliatory barrage of missiles and drones across the Middle East. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz — choking off 20 percent of global oil supply in what the International Energy Agency called the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Five weeks later, the war grinds on. Brent crude has spiked past USD 120 per barrel. The Strait remains functionally closed. And the US military, having burned through USD 5.6 billion in munitions in just the first two days, is now cannibalizing its Pacific defenses to keep up.

In early March, the Pentagon began transferring THAAD components from Seongju, South Korea, to the Middle East — the system’s AN/TPY-2 radar and interceptor launchers that were specifically deployed to counter North Korean ballistic missiles. Patriot batteries followed. South Korean President Lee acknowledged the redeployment but was blunt about the power imbalance: “We oppose the withdrawal of some US air defense weapons used for our country’s military needs, but it is also a harsh reality that we cannot completely impose our opinion.” The Stars and Stripes confirmed the transfers. Iranian strikes had already destroyed at least two AN/TPY-2 radars in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, forcing Washington to raid the Korean Peninsula to plug the gaps.

This is not a theoretical debate about alliance credibility anymore. Seoul is watching its missile shield get dismantled in real time to fight someone else’s war. And the economic carnage is just as personal. South Korea routes 70 percent of its crude oil imports through the Strait of Hormuz. The KOSPI recorded its worst single-session decline in 43 years. The won hit a 17-year low. Seoul imposed fuel price caps for the first time in three decades and proposed a KRW 26.2 trillion (roughly USD 17.1 billion) supplementary budget just to absorb the energy shock. The OECD slashed South Korea’s growth forecast by 0.4 percentage points — the steepest downgrade among major economies.

Now layer the North Korean threat on top of this. The technical picture makes Washington’s denial even harder to sustain. North Korea’s Hwasong-19 — a solid-fueled ICBM tested in October 2024 — flew for nearly 86 minutes to a maximum altitude of 7,688 kilometers on a lofted trajectory. The Center for Strategic and International Studies assessed it as the largest operational road-mobile ICBM in the world. Analysts at 38 North noted the missile likely features a post-boost vehicle consistent with MIRV capability. In September 2025, Pyongyang unveiled the Hwasong-20, with roughly 40 percent more thrust. Just this month, 38 North reported North Korea had ground-tested yet another upgraded rocket motor approximately 20 percent more powerful than the Hwasong-20 engine. A 2025 Defense Intelligence Agency report confirmed that North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site has been restored and is postured for a seventh nuclear test at a time of its choosing.

Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, said in November 2024 that North Korea has not yet demonstrated the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead to the US mainland via ICBM. That word — “yet” — should keep people up at night. President Lee assessed that only one critical step remains: mastery of atmospheric reentry technology. Kim has promised continuous testing to close that exact gap. When he does, what’s Washington’s plan? There isn’t one. Just strategic ambiguity, a wish list from 2018, and a military that’s currently too busy in the Persian Gulf to focus.

The broader context makes this even more alarming. New START — the last remaining US-Russia nuclear arms treaty — expired on Feb. 5, 2026, with no replacement. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it a grave moment for international peace and security. For the first time in more than half a century, there are no binding limits on the two largest nuclear arsenals. The Iran war itself was partly triggered by fears about Tehran’s nuclear program — the IAEA reported Iran had stored highly enriched uranium in an underground facility. So Washington will launch a full-scale military campaign to prevent Iran from going nuclear but won’t update its diplomatic framework to deal with a country that already has 50 warheads and is building more every month. The contradiction is staggering.

The alliance consequences are materializing fast. A joint report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Asan Institute, published in February 2026, noted that shifts in the US global role have “yielded new questions regarding the enduring nature of the US commitment to the alliance.” The Asan Institute’s 2025 flagship poll found that 76.2 percent of South Koreans now support developing indigenous nuclear weapons — an all-time high since the institute began tracking the question in 2010. Confidence that the United States would actually use nuclear weapons to defend South Korea dropped to 48.9 percent. The THAAD redeployment and the Iran war’s economic fallout will only accelerate this erosion.

Japan is moving, too. It holds 45 tons of weapons-grade plutonium and the technical latency to assemble a uranium weapon within six months to a year, according to nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker. South Korea is renegotiating its 123 Agreement with Washington to enrich uranium domestically. A Council on Foreign Relations analysis published this month noted that the Iran war and the Trump administration’s apparent indifference to Asian allies have sparked serious consideration in Tokyo and Seoul about whether they should develop their own nuclear weapons. An Asia Times analysis from March framed it even more starkly: the Iran war has delivered a verdict on nuclear latency as a strategy, and the implications for Northeast Asia are profound.

Here’s the terrifying paradox. If North Korea crosses the operational ICBM threshold without a clear US response, the credibility of American extended deterrence — already strained by the THAAD withdrawal, the Iran war’s resource drain, and Trump’s transactional approach to alliances — collapses. An unchecked North Korean deterrent could embolden Pyongyang to adopt a far more aggressive posture toward South Korea, banking on Washington’s hesitation to intervene when American cities are on the line. But the flip side is equally terrifying: if the perceived threat shifts from abstract to imminent, it could prompt consideration of a preemptive strike. Already in 2022, Curtis Scaparrotti, former commander of US Forces Korea, noted that the prospect of preemptive action had gained traction. A preemptive strike carries catastrophic risk — retaliation against Seoul or Tokyo, potential Chinese and Russian involvement. The Korean Peninsula, home to 51 million South Koreans and nearly 30,000 US service members, is not a theoretical chessboard.

So what’s the alternative? It is not capitulation but realism. Reopening diplomatic channels to negotiate an ICBM test moratorium, establishing shared rules of deterrence, and institutionalizing regional crisis-management protocols — none of this requires accepting North Korea’s nuclear program as morally legitimate. It requires accepting it as operationally real. Kim has left the door open, barely, for talks conditioned on Washington abandoning its insistence on denuclearization. That’s not an acceptable starting position, but it’s a starting position. A framework that aims to cap and contain rather than reverse could buy time, reduce the risk of accidental escalation, and preserve the credibility of extended deterrence before Tokyo and Seoul decide to go it alone.

The immediate priorities, as De Angelis outlines them, are ending strategic ambiguity within the US government itself, aligning policymakers and the military around a clear response framework, and institutionalizing crisis communication channels with Beijing and Moscow. These are not luxuries but necessities which are all the more urgent now that America’s military attention and missile defense assets are hemorrhaging into the Middle East.

The window is closing. Every month without engagement is another month of warhead production, another ICBM engine test, another step toward a capability that Washington has no coordinated plan for managing. The Iran war has shown us, in real time, what happens when the US tries to handle two nuclear crises simultaneously with the defense architecture for one. And when North Korea demonstrates a fully operational nuclear ICBM — not if, when — the cost of denial will be measured not in diplomatic embarrassment, but in strategic paralysis at the worst possible moment.

There’s a word for continuing to demand something you know won’t happen while refusing to prepare for what will. Diplomacy? Definitely no. It’s sheer negligence. And right now, with THAAD launchers on cargo planes headed to the Persian Gulf and Kim Jong Un’s engineers testing bigger rocket motors, that negligence has never been more dangerous.