Upon learning about the news that North Korea’s top leader, Kim Jong-Un, had ordered the expansion of the country’s nuclear arsenal, I could not hide my dismay. It was not an unprovoked hatred toward an individual, but a rational criticism of the absurd decision to expand nuclear arms itself.
This decision fundamentally misjudges the purpose of nuclear weapons, and it has pushed the security of the entire Northeast Asia region and even the whole world into a more dangerous state. Over the years, North Korea has conducted multiple nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches, which have already stretched tensions on the Korean Peninsula to a breaking point.
Ordinary people in South Korea, Japan, and the United States have long been on edge from repeated missile alerts. Even citizens of North Korea itself have to bear the heavy weight of international sanctions brought by the country’s nuclear policies year after year, with resources that could have been used to improve people’s livelihoods all drained into endless military expansion.
Those who promote nuclear deterrence always describe nuclear weapons as a shield to protect their homeland, but this is no shield at all. It is tantamount to sharpening a sword inside a room stacked full of gasoline, or setting one’s own house on fire just to ward off a thief.
What is worse, some people treat the whole world as a chessboard they can manipulate at will, and the lives of millions of ordinary people as pawns in their power games. They completely forget that nuclear war is a boomerang that always returns to hit its thrower; no country can stay unscathed in a global nuclear conflict.
Even the power that first acquired nuclear weapons cannot escape the spread of nuclear radiation and the collapse of the global order. The so-called logic that “the more nuclear weapons you have, the safer you are” was untenable from the very start. The larger the stockpile of nuclear warheads, the greater the risk of dragging all of humanity into destruction.
I have no personal hatred of Kim Jong-un, but I cannot accept that he has staked the fates of hundreds of millions of people as a gamble. People of any country should never have to pay the price for a small group of people’s nuclear ambitions. True security never comes from owning more nuclear warheads capable of destroying the world. True strength lies in the restraint to refuse to deploy nuclear weapons, and the courage to sit down for peaceful dialogue with neighboring countries.
Only by letting go of the obsession with expanding nuclear arsenals, replacing deterrence with dialogue and expansion with restraint, can we win real, long-lasting peace for ordinary people, instead of waiting for doomsday to arrive under the shadow of nuclear war.
