The nuclear crisis between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the United States of America legally relates to Pyongyang’s violations as state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Kim Jong Un’s regime claims that it left the global non-proliferation regime, freeing it to develop an indigenous nuclear arsenal if it so chooses. The rest of the world, with the United States in the vanguard, insists that the nuclear assistance that the DPRK received prior to this negates its right to withdraw. On these grounds, the “hermit kingdom” is classed as a ‘rogue state,’ subject to unilateral and UN Security Council sanction, or even preventive military action, in the eyes of the Trump administration.
The greeting of North Korea’s battery of nuclear tests since 2006 with threats, sanctions, censure, bluster, and tweets signifies more than a broken contract however—the relationship between illegalizing new nuclear-weapon states and marginalizing those governments most contemptuous of the world’s pecking order dates to the Cold War, when the Sino-Soviet split divided friend from friend and reconciled foe to foe. The 1968 NPT and the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty that preceded it were devised by the United States and the Soviet Union not to halt the spread of nuclear weapons, with their attendant, existential risks, but to justify the further exclusion the People’s Republic of China from the world’s governing councils—the United Nations and International Communist and Workers Parties. Rather than affording a means to avert a cataclysmic Third World War, from inception, nuclear non-proliferation served as a scarlet letter for those regimes most critical of a prevailing order in which the United States and its peers operated as judge, jury, police, and executioner.