How would North Korea’s development of the capability to target the United States with nuclear weapons influence its foreign policy? I argue that it would cause more dangerous crises than those of the last decade, and predict that these crises would eventually cause Kim Jong Un and his senior military associates to experience fear of imminent nuclear war or conventional regime change. I show that the effect of such fear would depend on whether or not Kim believes that he has control over the occurrence of these events. I argue that if he experiences fear and believes that he has some control over whether these extreme events actually happen, he will moderate his nuclear threats and behave more like other experienced nuclear powers. But if he experiences fear and believes that he has no control, he will likely pursue policies that could cause nuclear war. I use this insight to prescribe and proscribe policies for Washington, Seoul and the regional community.

This article examines the issue of coercively preventing states from acquiring and possessing nuclear weapons. In questioning whether such coercion is morally legitimate, I argue that Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) political theory contains important resources compared with three rival perspectives: Realpolitik, the Just War Tradition, and Deontological Pacifism. I also argue that coercive anti-proliferation measures are conditionally legitimated by three distinctive Kantian concepts: First, his concept of International Justice allows for coercion against genuinely aggressive states engaged in nuclear aspiration. Second, given the imperfections of international justice institutions, his concept of a State of Peoples – an authorized global governance body – seems to provide a better guarantee of just forms of coercive nuclear anti-proliferation. Third, supplementing the first two concepts, Kant discusses a Cosmopolitan Right to share the earth’s surface. This concept justifies coercive anti-proliferation when a people’s right to existence as citizens of the earth is threatened by nuclear weapons.