Kim Jong-Un apparently views Qaddafi as an example of what happens if you’re an eccentric dictator without nuclear weapons. As I’ve noted before, nuclear weapons don’t guarantee your regime’s survival, as Mikhail Gorbachev could tell you. That aside, does the Qaddafi analogy hold water?
No, for the following reasons:
1. The North Korean regime already has a very powerful conventional deterrent. Any attack on the regime runs the risk of an artillery assault on Seoul that could kill millions. Qaddafi didn’t have anything like that.
2. It’s far from clear that nuclear weapons would have saved Qaddafi. They would have been completely useless against the Libyan rebels, and they might not have been much of a deterrent against the limited US, British, and French intervention, given that he didn’t have an obvious way of delivering them to the homes of his enemies.
In reality, North Korean nukes are a source of instability and danger to the regime, not a guarantee of its survival. Their only legitimate function is to serve as a symbol of the regime’s power and success to the North Korean people, but that is likely to backfire in the near future.