As if We Didn’t Have Enough to Frighten Us …

The globe is already pockmarked with crises, and here may be another: North Korea is acting in highly unusual ways, leading some veteran analysts to fear it is preparing a surprise attack on South Korea and perhaps on Japan and Guam as well.

I’ve seen many false alarms since I began covering and visiting North Korea in the 1980s. I wouldn’t write about this latest warning except that it comes from two particularly credible experts who bluntly conclude that “Kim Jong-un has made a strategic decision to go to war.”

That’s speculation without hard evidence to back it up, and they acknowledge that this kind of prediction is fraught. But one of those experts is Robert Carlin, who has been analyzing North Korea for 50 years for the C.I.A., State Department and other organizations. The other is Siegfried Hecker, a nuclear expert at Stanford who has visited North Korea seven times and was given extensive access to that country’s nuclear programs; he’s apparently the only American to have held North Korean plutonium (in a jar) in his hands.

Carlin and Hecker published their warning in an essay on the 38 North website, which focuses on North Korea. They raised the possibility that North Korea might use its nuclear warheads to strike the region (it’s not clear if its warheads could reach the United States and survive re-entry into the atmosphere).

Carlin and Hecker both told me that they don’t know when an attack by Kim, the country’s leader, would happen or what form it might take.

“Is it going to be an all-out attack?” Carlin asked. “I have no idea what the thinking of his army is right now. I suspect it is making plans and they’re arguing about it. And some of them are saying, ‘This is nuts. We can’t do it.’ Others are saying: ‘This is what the leader wants, and we’re going to do it. And actually, we have enough missiles and nuclear warheads that we can.’ ”