U.S. President Donald Trump and his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in must face North Korea's nuclear reality: Pyongyang's bomb is here to stay. They need to drop quixotic efforts to stop Kim Jong Un from building a nuclear arsenal and instead focus on preventing its use. Trump must accept the evidence that sanctions and military shows of force do not move the North. Moon must accept that a Sunshine Policy of economic and political outreach will not coax Pyongyang from its nuclear tether as long as Kim equates the arsenal with survival.
Washington also should take military action off the table unless the crisis is so acute that no other option remains. North Korea has advanced its nuclear program too far and concealed too much to allow Israeli-style airstrikes like those that eliminated the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear reactors in 1981 and 2007. The mayhem that would result from any U.S. military invasion to find and destroy Pyongyang's bombs would envelop most of the Korean Peninsula and could leave in its wake hundreds of thousands of dead South Koreans.
Fortunately, the history of the nuclear age suggests an alternative. Containment.
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