North Korea is building tactical nuclear weapons – for use on the battlefield – and that raises tricky command-and-control problems for actually using them in combat. I put some thoughts on this at 1945 magazine.

Basically, if Kim Jong Un wants to use nukes as a warfighting tool, then he has to let his battlefield commanders have authority to use them. He must delegate release authority. But North Korea is a monolithic autocracy, and there’s no way Kim wants to share power over the something as symbolic as its nukes. That NK has produced almost nothing else of note in decades besides nukes makes assertive control over them even more political salient.

Assertive control is fine if Kim wants a stable balance of terror with the Americans based on mutually assured destruction. But if he intends to ‘conventionalize’ nukes to be used like artillery on the battlefield – which makes sense given how unbalanced the conventional contest with SK and the US is – then he has to delgate to local commanders with better information. Kim himself with be trapped in the fog of war once a conflict starts and won’t be able to use nukes dynamically and responsively.

I am not sure anyone can figure out how Kim can square this circle. Try 1945 for the full argument.