The simple answer to the question of whether North Korea will ever willingly give up its nuclear weapons is: “No.” 

The more complex and nuanced answer is: “Hell, no.” 

OK, maybe that is a bit too dramatic. I am a historian, after all, and people in my profession tend to define “ever” as covering a really, really, really, long period of time.

Strange and unexpected things do happen over really, really, really, long periods of time.

But, watching a DPRK leader willingly giving up these weapons would certainly be near the top of that list.

Why North Korea Wants Nuclear Weapons 

The critical factor is that North Korea’s commitment to its nuclear program is not just a product of the international security environment, but is instead rooted in domestic politics and ideology.

The Kim family has long positioned itself as the great protector of the Korean people, an almost superhuman line of leaders that is uniquely qualified to protect the country against the evil machinations of foreign antagonists. For much of the nation’s early years, Kim Il Sung rooted this position in both economic and security terms, insisting that only he could lead the country down this dual path towards a socialist utopia.

Long-term economic problems, however, have largely rendered moot the Kim family’s claim to rule in terms of national prosperity. Instead, Kim’s son and grandson have steadily shifted the emphasis to their ability to ensure national security through a military-first policy. And recent years have seen Kim Jong Un make this link between his rule and nuclear weapons increasingly explicit and central to his regime’s raison d'être.

Reports of domestic propaganda over the last few years have reflected this close linkage. North Korean propaganda posters––briefly modulated during the Kim-Trump talks––have returned to celebrate alleged nuclear triumphs and the greatness of the DPRK government that produced them. Nuclear weapons are featured on stamps, calendars, and school notebooks. Media broadcasts assure the population that nuclear weapons not only keep the nefarious United States at bay but also offer a path towards economic prosperity by forcing the US to remove sanctions and treat the country as an equal.

Government rhetoric similarly applauds the country’s nuclear status, even codifying its nuclear policy and status into law that declares the program “irreversible,” while Kim explains that he will not yield on the program even if the nation faced a century of sanctions. Nukes, he declared, represented the “dignity, body, and absolute power of the state.”

History will tell us whether Kim’s efforts to retain power by so closely linking his regime to the nuclear weapons program proves successful in the long-term. For now, though, any effort to truly understand the central role the program plays in DPRK society must start by recognizing the domestic political imperatives that lay behind it. And those domestic political imperatives mean that as long as there is a Kim family dictatorship in North Korea, there will be nuclear weapons alongside it.

Mitchell Lerner is professor of History and faculty fellow at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University, where he is also director of the East Asian Studies Center. Lerner has received fellowships and grants from the Korea Foundation, Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, Dwight Eisenhower Presidential Library, and John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. He has served as editor of Passport: The Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations Review, and is now associate editor of the a Journal of American-East Asian Relations. In 2005, Lerner won the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching, and in 2019, he won the Ohio Academy of History's Distinguished Teacher Prize. In 2022, he was the Peter Hahn Distinguished Service Award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

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