Nuclear security

Prevent nuclear catastrophe: Finally end the Korean War

The long-simmering confrontation between the United States and North Korea has reached a moment of unprecedented tension. The risk that unintended war will break out due to misjudgment is high. Indeed, as others have observed, East Asia is witnessing a “Cuban Missile Crisis in slow motion.”

According to Graham Allison, director of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, it is now time “to examine previously unthinkable options” on the Korean Peninsula—such as scaling back joint US-South Korean military exercises in exchange for a freeze on North Korean tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Considering these “unthinkable” options, Allison writes, would follow in a tradition established during the Cuban Missile Crisis by John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, who both “blinked,” and whose behavior ultimately amounted to cooperative crisis management. One of the most unthinkable options for the Korean Peninsula—but perhaps the most promising—is for the United States and China to finally pursue a formal end to the Korean War.