U.S. Scholar Robert Pape Says South Korea, United States And China Should Come Up With A Mechanism For Nukes In Post-Kim North Korea

by Diana Tomale / Sep 12, 2015 02:03 PM EDT

(Photo by: Chung Sung Jun / Getty Images News) People watch news reporting the North Korean missile being launched in a railway station in South Korea.

A US scholar said that South Korea, United States and China should foresee the future of North Korea after Kim Jong Un's regime and should come up with "a mechanism to head off a possible handover of North Korean nuclear weapons to terrorist groups," Korea Herald reported on Thursday.

University of Chicago professor Robert Pape said a sudden fall down of Kim's regime would primarily result to "loose nukes" - in which he refers to "poorly guarded atomic devices, fissile materials or related know-how feared to fall into the wrong hands."

"But if there's any North Korean regime collapse, then the individuals who might get possession of those nuclear weapons or nuclear material would have far less reason not to sell them, not to use them for very short-term purposes," says Pape.

"In a general anarchy against all, it's much more uncertain and much more dangerous what will happen to the nuclear materials and any nuclear weapons that were fashioned."

He also said that a cooperative framework would be a good idea since the three countries show interest in North Korea's weaponry, adding that a "real mess" could happen in the future if South Korea, US and China would fail to work closely.

"Whether it is an institution, if you would, or a set of arrangements about how these three countries are really going to act in unstable circumstances, I think that set of arrangements could be highly secret; there's no reason why they have to become public," he says.

"But there's really no sign at the moment that there has been anything like this serious kind of military-to-military talks that would be needed to deal with that."

Meanwhile, a North Korean defector revealed that Kim's reign would be the "shortest ever" and is expected to "collapse within ten years."

"It is Kim Jong-un's regime that is the most unstable," says North Korean defector, who refused to be named for safety purposes. "And it is going to be the shortest."