Why North Korea Got the Bomb (And Iran Did Not, for Now)
Why did North Korea get nuclear weapons when other states with similar nuclear ambitions like Iraq, Syria, and most recently Iran did not? The standard answer points to US. policy failures. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, Victor Cha acknowledges that the US strategy for addressing North Korea’s nuclear program has failed and calls for a new framework aimed at managing its nuclear threat. Similarly, Joel Wit’s recent memoir laments the inability of successive US administrations to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough with Pyongyang. Scholars like Nicholas Miller and Vipin Narang even suggest that the North Korean case defies traditional theories of nuclear proliferation, characterizing it as an outlier and calling for theoretical adjustments to account for it.
However, the most decisive variable in Pyongyang’s successful nuclearization campaign may actually lie elsewhere. The willingness of states facing a regional nuclearizing rival to absorb the costs of war better explains the cause of Pyongyang’s proliferation success. Situating counterproliferation campaigns against Iraq, Syria, and Iran alongside the one against North Korea reveals that Israel’s willingness to use force and bear the subsequent costs is what stopped three would-be proliferators, whereas Seoul’s refusal to take that same risk is what allowed one to succeed.
South Korea: War as Never an Option
Launching a preemptive strike against North Korea today is hardly thinkable as it will almost certainly trigger a nuclear response from Pyongyang, which now possesses several nuclear weapons in storage and multiple forms and ranges of delivery systems. The record shows, however, that even when North Korea’s nuclear program was still in its infancy, military action was never an option for South Korea. For the three South Korean presidents who presided over a pre-nuclear North Korea—Kim Young-sam, Kim Dae-jung, and Roh Moo-hyun—using military force to eliminate Pyongyang’s nuclear threat was never on the menu of counterproliferation measures.
Kim Young-sam, who assumed office in 1992, was the first president to have the option to militarily remove North Korea’s nuclear threat with US support. North Korea joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985 under Soviet pressure but delayed IAEA inspections for many years. When inspectors finally gained access in 1992, they discovered evidence of undeclared plutonium reprocessing at the Yongbyon Scientific Nuclear Research Center and demanded access to suspicious nuclear sites. Pyongyang denied access and announced its withdrawal from the NPT, thereby triggering the first nuclear crisis, which peaked in June 1994, when Kim learned of the US plan to strike North Korea’s nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. As Kim puts it in his memoir, the Peninsula was on “the brink of war,” and he set out to prevent it.
Kim Young-sam immediately summoned James Laney, US Ambassador to Seoul, to the Blue House and delivered a passionate plea to stop the US military plan against North Korea’s nuclear facilities. He then conveyed equally passionate and defiant messages to US President Bill Clinton. Kim insisted that war with the North would kill countless people and collapse the Korean economy. He protested that war could never happen; otherwise, he “would be committing a sin before history and the Korean people.”
Interestingly, however, the very same Kim Young-sam who proudly recounts successfully convincing Clinton to call off the airstrikes at the last moment, expressed regret for doing so 14 years later. According to a Wikileaks document, Kim told a US diplomat in a private conversation that (at that time) a military strike rendering the Peninsula “nuclear-free” would have left everyone better off. Yet, however remorseful he may have felt after the fact, Kim showed no willingness to tolerate the potential costs of war with North Korea when he had the international legitimacy and support to do so.
The Agreed Framework, signed between US and North Korea in October 1994, resolved the first North Korea nuclear crisis but did not fundamentally remove its nuclear threat. The agreement only dealt with North Korea’s plutonium production program and was effective in curbing those capabilities for the duration of its implementation. However, through the late 1990s, North Korea secretly acquired centrifuge technology through the A.Q. Khan network, laying the groundwork for a parallel uranium enrichment program.
Kim Dae-jung, who succeeded Kim Young-sam in 1998, was even more committed to the idea of non-military measures in resolving North Korea’s nuclear issues. He was the architect of what is known as the “sunshine policy,” an approach designed to incentivize Pyongyang to forgo further nuclear development through dialogue, trust-building, and economic cooperation. As he also notes in his memoir, war with North Korea as a policy option to remove its nuclear threat was never on the table. For him, wars make people lose their dignity and take too many innocent lives. He saw it as his life mission to prevent war and bring about the peaceful reunification of the Peninsula. Kim Dae-jung would have emphatically opposed any strike plan even if the perfect window had arisen.
The second nuclear crisis broke out in October 2002 when Washington confronted Pyongyang with evidence of its secret uranium enrichment program. The Agreed Framework collapsed, the 5MWe reactor at Yongbyon was restarted, and North Korea withdrew from the NPT entirely in 2003. Roh Moo-hyun, who succeeded Kim Dae-jung in February 2003, inherited both the crisis and his predecessor’s framework for managing it. He, too, was categorically opposed to the use of force in dealing with Pyongyang’s nuclear threat. He writes in his posthumously published memoir that when the United States brought up the option of surgical strikes against North Korea’s nuclear facilities, he managed to dissuade the Americans from doing so. Roh believed that removing the military option from the table was necessary to earn North Korea’s trust and infuse predictability into the relationship. He assured the South Korean people that so long as he was president, there would be no military action against North Korea.
In the early 2000s, attempts to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions shifted to multilateral talks, conducted through the Six Party process involving the US, South Korea, North Korea, China, Russia and Japan. However, this process was also fraught with political and bureaucratic conditions that limited its ability to sustain implementation of various commitments. In 2006, Pyongyang conducted its first nuclear test, severely narrowing the window of opportunity to stop North Korea’s nuclear path.
Israel: War as Always an Option
Israel offers the mirror image. The two states share a structural position: US allies facing a regional proliferating rival. Yet, they diverge sharply on what they have been willing to absorb to keep that rival from crossing the nuclear threshold. Where Seoul treated any strike on the North as a war it was obligated to avoid, Jerusalem has consistently treated a war to keep an adversary from going nuclear as one it could not afford to leave un-waged. Seoul’s restraint was its own choice. By contrast, Israel, from Begin to Olmert to Netanyahu, has been willing to use force, and to absorb the costs of the war that might follow, even when those costs were estimated to be high.
Israel’s high degree of cost-tolerance has roots deeper than is commonly appreciated. The Begin Doctrine, articulated after the 1981 strike on Osirak, is more than a foreign policy posture. It sits against the backdrop of the Holocaust narrative: that the state must do whatever it can to prevent an existential danger to the Jewish people and that it must always keep watch for a gathering threat so the fate of the Jews of Europe is never repeated. That conviction is what makes Israel willing, again and again, to use force against a future danger, and to pay the price now rather than later. It also leads Israelis to view any proliferating actor in the region in the darkest possible light.
The Begin Doctrine also rests on a popular mandate: military action against Iran’s nuclear program commands broad support among Israelis. Begin’s strike on Osirak and Olmert’s on Deir ez-Zor in 2007 had drawn domestic criticism at the time, but it did not dissuade future Israeli leaders from using force against other regional proliferating actors. That mandate is what enabled Netanyahu in 2025 and 2026 to launch operations against Iran.
Israel’s resolve to prevent the nuclear armament of its regional rivals has held steady even as the price of a military strike rose. In 1981, the cost that worried Begin at Osirak was not Iraqi retaliation but the safety of the pilots and the risk to the still-fresh peace with Egypt. By 2007, at Deir ez-Zor, Israel feared Syrian retaliation and worked to avoid it by giving Assad an off-ramp through silence and no claim of credit. By 2025, after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel’s willingness to use force in general has grown, especially for stopping a proliferating adversary rose. On the eve of the first Iran campaign, Israeli assessments were far darker than what came to pass, projecting heavy civilian casualties and in turn, existential rhetoric. Israel struck anyway.
The lesson from October 7 for Israel was that intelligence failure plus restraint was catastrophic, and that threats allowed to mature would eventually strike back, as they did on that morning. Moreover, the tolerance for costs rose. High casualties, diplomatic isolation, allied criticism, and pressure on funding and trade—factors that would typically deter a small state from engaging in a preventive war—no longer carried the same weight they did before October 7. More importantly, a nuclear Iran has been firmly established in Israeli society as the ultimate threat, one that must be removed at any cost. Indeed, the costs of a military counterproliferation campaign against Iran were not theoretical. Israel absorbed retaliatory missile and drone barrages, accepted months of economic disruption, and walked into a regional war footing without a clean exit. Seoul has never had to ask its public to absorb anything close.
The differences in the two countries’ political resolve to risk a war notwithstanding, it must still be acknowledged that the two countries operate in different strategic and historical contexts. Geography is the most obvious. Israel’s relative distance from its nuclearizing adversaries makes the political decision to launch a preventive strike relatively easier to take. South Korea and North Korea, by contrast, are separated by a four-kilometer-wide demilitarized zone; nearly all of South Korea lies within range of North Korea’s artillery and short-range missiles. This proximity shapes how South Korean leaders weigh the risk of any strike on the North. Syria, it is true, also shares a border with Israel, but the entire rationale behind the Deir ez-Zor operation was to keep the strike covert and avoid triggering the kind of retaliation that proximity makes possible.
Historical context diverges just as sharply. For Korean leaders, war evokes the devastation of the Korean War, 1950-1953: a Peninsula reduced to rubble, families divided, and a poverty that took decades to overcome. For Israeli leaders, war is bound up with the country’s founding and survival — its 1948 War and the ones that followed are remembered as necessary and formative acts of the state’s existence. Finally, North Korea has not been a clear-cut strategic rival to South Korea the same way Iraq, Syria, and Iran have been to Israel; it represented, and continues to represent, an ambiguous entity with which South Korea is in conflict but ultimately expected to unite. Although support for unification has declined in recent years, roughly half of the South Korean population still perceives it as necessary, and a majority continue to favor cooperation with the North. That sentiment, and the optimism about eventual reunification, was even stronger in the 1990s and 2000s, following the end of the Cold War. Israel never had to navigate that dilemma.
Yet, while these contextual factors shape how leaders perceive risk or even the nature of a rival, they do not predetermine how they make choices in critical decision making moments. As Kim Young-sam’s regretful confession illustrates, he could have gathered the resolve to launch a preventive strike against North Korea’s nuclear facilities but chose not to. This underscores that political willingness to absorb the immediate brunt of war, more than context alone, can still matter greatly in successful counterproliferation campaigns against regional nuclearizing rivals.
A Contingent Doctrine
This asymmetry invites a reframing of Washington’s role in a counterproliferation campaign. Washington’s role mattered, but Israel’s has been larger than conventional wisdom tends to assume. Israel’s active military posture, often wrapped in existential rhetoric, has been unambiguous. The decisive variable was not US readiness to engage in kinetic action; it was whether Israel, as a state facing a regional nuclearizing rival, was willing to absorb what the war would cost. In the North Korean case, South Korea did not see the costs of war as a viable option.
The doctrine on display, however, is a contingent one. Its success depends on three things that no front-line state can fully manufacture on its own: a public willingness to underwrite a kinetic operation against a proliferator; an alliance willing to keep weapons flowing and provide diplomatic cover throughout the counterproliferation campaign; and intelligence sharp enough to see, in time, when the other actor is breaking for a bomb. Whether Israel’s intervention has kept Iran from the bomb or only delayed it remains to be seen, but Israel’s current campaign against Iran has all three relevant factors. The same cannot be said for the Korean case.