How Serious are North Korea’s Pre-emptive Attack Threats?

Korea Chair Snapshot

• Annual Key Resolve and Foal Eagle joint military exercises commenced today on March 7.  Their scale is larger than previous exercises and will run until April 30.
• Over the weekend, North Korea threatened to launch a “preemptive nuclear strike of justice” in response to the military exercises. 
• How serious are these threats?  Rhetoric out of North Korea is always fiery preceding and during these annual exercises.  They could amount to no more than a rhetorical response to South Korean press reports that the US-ROK exercises may practice strikes against North Korean targets including leadership and military installations.
• Our data on annual U.S. – ROK military exercises looked at the correlation between Key Resolve/Foal Eagle (and their antecedents) and North Korean belligerence. The dataset dating back to 2005 shows that:
  • U.S.-ROK military exercises do not provoke North Korean belligerence (Refer to Graph A).
  • Instead, the primary determinant of North Korean provocations is the status of U.S.-North Korea relations in the period [For methodology, refer to Table A] preceding the exercise – if negative, their behavior will be provocative.  If the pre-existing relationship is neutral, then their behavior will remain neutral despite the exercise.
  • For example, relations in 2008 remained neutral (even amicable) before and after the week of exercises that year, with negotiations within the Six-Party Talks and the planned demolition of the Yongbyun cooling tower in June unaffected.  On the other hand, U.S.-North Korea relations in the beginning of 2013 was already at a low after the North’s missile test the previous December, and the negativity of the relations carried over during the two-month exercise period that year, punctuated by the 3rd nuclear test in February.
• Given the negative state of U.S.-North Korea relations over the past two months, it is likely that these exercises will correlate with some North Korean belligerent actions.  A pre-emptive strike would require a technical capability not yet publicly demonstrated fully by the North.