In the Event of a North Korean Missile Crisis

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warheads. This tactic, known as “hitting a bullet with a bullet,” has failed half the time. As such, the Trump administration plans to invest millions of dollars into two other approaches, including cyber-attacks that would sabotage guidance systems and missile launches before they occur. The second approach involves attacking rising missiles in the “boost phase” with fighter jets and drones. Why Model III Matters Using the conceptual lenses of Model II, the mishaps of the Kennedy administration were identified. And from these mistakes, potential resolutions to the weaknesses of the current administration were also proposed. So how does Model III come into play? Like Model II, the Bureaucratic Politics Paradigm focuses on the internal mechanism of the government rather than the rationale of unitary actors. And like Model II, it takes into account the importance of information; for more “precise predictions,” both models require “considerably more information about the organizations and politics of [North Korea] than is publicly available” (Allison 1969, 717). But unlike Model II, Model III also takes into account the skills and personal stakes of individual players. In describing how Model III bears on the simmering crisis, a section will be devoted to discussing Model III’s key concepts and how they explain the Cuban Missile Crisis. Using Model III’s conceptual framework, a second section will extract important lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis and discuss how they apply to current events. According to Model III, “ the actor is neither a unitary nation nor a conglomerate of organizations, but rather a group of individual players” (Allison 1969, 708). Happenings in international affairs are the outcomes of bargaining games among government leaders. While Model I assumes that a unitary actor makes strategic decisions based on the national interest, Model III acknowledges that “the gap between the problems the player was solving and the 10
problem upon which the analyst focuses is often very wide.” Allison states, “each decision has critical consequences not only for the strategic problem but for each player’s organizational, reputational, and personal stakes.” Important government actions “emerge as collages composed of individual acts” and ”‘outcomes of minor and major games” (Allison 1969, 710). As such, the most rational course of actions is not always chosen. For instance, diplomatic resolutions were immediately off the table when it was confirmed on October 16 that the Russians had installed offensive ballistic missiles in Cuba. The options of doing nothing or taking a diplomatic approach were discarded even though they were rational: the narrowing of the missile gap was inevitable and “it makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile from the Soviet Union or Cuba” (Schwartz and Derber 1990, 151). However, Kennedy had rhetorically committed himself in his presidential campaign against the possibility of Soviet provocations in Cuba. As Allison puts it, “Kennedy had staked his full Presidential authority on the assertion that the Soviets would not place offensive weapons in Cuba” and “Khrushchev’s deceitful move demanded a strong counter-move” (Allison 1969, 713-714). Kennedy’s political career would have been over unless he resolved the problem. Thus, government behavior is understood according to the perceptions, motivations, and maneuvers of specific players rather than rational decision-making. Fortunately, the Kennedy administration avoided a nuclear disaster partly because of central players like Robert McNamara, Robert Kennedy, and Theodore Sorensen. The gripping vision of a holocaust set McNamara firmly against the air strike. Additionally, Robert Kennedy, the President’s most trusted confidant, opposed the airstrike on moral grounds. He refused to see his brother become another “Tojo,” the Japanese wartime general who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sorensen, another trusted confidant, eventually joined Robert Kennedy and 11
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In the Event of a North Korean Missile Crisis

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