— Toward Denuclearization through De-escalation on the Korean Peninsula
By Lee Min-yong
As negotiations over North Korea’s denuclearization remain stalled, a more immediate and pressing security challenge has come to the fore on the Korean Peninsula: how to manage nuclear confrontation before North Korea’s nuclear arsenal can realistically be eliminated. In a setting where a nuclear-armed actor exists, it is increasingly unclear whether further military or nuclear development reduces threats—or instead deepens regional instability and heightens the risk of inadvertent escalation.
The Korean Peninsula illustrates why the stable management of nuclear risk has become more urgent than denuclearization strategies or peace rhetoric alone. With North Korea showing no sign of reversing its nuclear posture, managing nuclear threats prior to disarmament has emerged as a central security task rather than a secondary concern.
Deterrence and Its Limits
Alongside the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula has long been regarded as one of the regions most vulnerable to large-scale war. Yet despite repeated military crises, full-scale conflict has not recurred since the Korean War. This record is often cited as evidence that military deterrence has prevented escalation beyond a critical threshold. Even amid frequent low-level clashes, escalation has often been contained at an early stage—suggesting the emergence of tacit, mutually recognized norms of crisis management between the two sides.
North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, however, has fundamentally altered the logic underpinning deterrence on the peninsula. Strategies once premised on prevailing through conventional military confrontation in the event of deterrence failure have lost their relevance. Deterrence failure now carries the risk of catastrophic escalation, including nuclear war, shifting the strategic balance toward existential vulnerability rather than battlefield outcomes.
Gray-Zone Conflict and the Growing Risk of Miscalculation
The security landscape on the Korean Peninsula has increasingly evolved into one characterized by gray-zone conflict, where the boundary between peacetime and military confrontation is blurred. Recurrent low-intensity incidents—such as leaflet campaigns and drone-related encounters—have heightened the danger of unintended escalation driven by misperception and misjudgment.
In a nuclear context, even limited confrontations can trigger broader crises—and, in extreme cases, nuclear war. As a result, the central determinant of security is no longer the scale or frequency of individual incidents, but the ability to prevent any form of military confrontation in advance and to manage escalation once a crisis emerges.
Strategic Implications Beyond the Region
Although geographically distant from South Asia, the Korean Peninsula may appear regionally confined. Yet it represents a rare convergence of nuclear weapons, great-power rivalry, and gray-zone conflict. Instability in Northeast Asia would therefore not remain localized; its effects would ripple through the global nuclear order, fuel arms competition, and shape the strategic calculations of major powers.
In terms of nuclear threat dynamics, South Asia and East Asia share important similarities. A critical difference, however, lies in the structure of nuclear stability: while South Asia has moved toward a form of nuclear balance, East Asia continues to be characterized by nuclear asymmetry and enduring instability.
The peninsula thus serves as a test case for whether crisis management can work under nuclear confrontation—lessons that are likely to inform policy debates in other regions facing similar dilemmas.
Risk Reduction over Total Confrontation
In this context, policy discussions have increasingly moved away from treating nuclear threats solely as a matter of all-out confrontation. Instead, greater attention is being paid to risk reduction and crisis management. This perspective echoes the concept of common security that informed nuclear arms control efforts between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Facing the catastrophic risk of inadvertent nuclear war, Washington and Moscow pursued arms control alongside crisis-management mechanisms. Even in the absence of deep mutual trust, both sides recognized that avoiding nuclear war constituted a shared interest. This experience demonstrates that, in a nuclear setting, deterrence and dialogue are not mutually exclusive; they can operate in tandem.
Dialogue as a Tool for Crisis Management
From a crisis-management perspective, dialogue should not be understood as a reward for improved relations or the outcome of trust-building. Rather, it serves as a basic technical safeguard against escalation. Dialogue is not something that becomes possible only after trust has been established; it is often most necessary when trust is absent.
Even in conflict, parties typically maintain at least rudimentary channels to signal intent and prevent accidents. In this context, the prolonged absence of inter-Korean communication is notable—and risky. Since the first hotline was established in 1971 and leader-to-leader contacts expanded in 2018, the two Koreas have gradually institutionalized crisis-management channels. These efforts reflected a longstanding recognition that communication is essential to crisis
management even in adversarial relationships. The current absence of such channels suggests that managing nuclear confrontation has become harder, not easier.
The Crisis-Management Role of Non-Political and Humanitarian Cooperation
Non-political and humanitarian cooperation also warrants reassessment through a crisis-management lens. Although such engagement was once expected to build trust, that assumption has often proved unrealistic under sustained hostility.
Yet non-political contact remains meaningful, even under hostility. In limited domains such as sports exchanges, symbolic interaction has persisted even amid antagonism, helping to insulate minimal contact from political and military confrontation. In U.S.–China relations, table tennis exchanges preceded diplomatic normalization, while in South Asia and on the Korean Peninsula, sports diplomacy has similarly functioned as a symbolic stabilizer.
Within this broader context, South Korean policy debates have explored cooperation in areas such as healthcare, public health, and tourism infrastructure. Earlier this year, reports indicated that a high-speed rail initiative linking the two Koreas and China was mentioned during a China–South Korea summit. These examples illustrate how non-political cooperation can create limited but meaningful spaces for communication aimed at crisis management, rather than serving as guarantees of broader reconciliation.
Conclusion
The Korean Peninsula underscores why crisis management must take precedence over denuclearization efforts in a nuclear-threat setting. In such environments, recognizing the catastrophic consequences of unmanaged conflict is more important than seeking immediate resolution. Hardline responses and unilateral dominance may appear decisive in the short term, but in a nuclear context they risk amplifying the possibility of mutual destruction.
In light of these risks, Korea has pursued a crisis-management framework aimed at preventing military conflict, sustaining deterrence, and treating denuclearization as a longer-term objective.
This approach reflects a pragmatic attempt to manage risk in a nuclear setting rather than respond through nuclear armament. The vision of a “nuclear-free Korean Peninsula” should therefore be understood not as an abstract ideal, but as a realistic, step-by-step strategy grounded in crisis management.
Professor Lee Min Yong is a Visiting Professor at the School of Global Service, Sookmyung Women’s University, specializing in East Asian security and international political economy.
