After Tests in the North, Conservatives in South Korea Call for a Nuclear Program

Smoke bombs exploding near South Korean tanks in a live-fire exercise on Thursday in Yangpyeong.CreditJang Se-Young/Newsis, via Associated Press

SEOUL, South Korea — In the wake of North Korea’s nuclear tests and satellite launches, some conservatives in South Korea are championing a strategy that was once seen as unthinkable: arming their own country with nuclear weapons.

Several members of President Park Geun-hye’s party have called for developing a nuclear program, a view that for now is contained to a small band of conservative politicians and pundits — most notably columnists affiliated with the country’s largest conservative newspaper, Chosun Ilbo.

Still, the notion of nuclear sovereignty holds sizable emotional sway over South Koreans, many of whom have never fully trusted Washington’s commitment to their defense or China’s promise to help halt North Korea’s nuclear program.

In a survey conducted by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul shortly after the North’s third nuclear test in 2013, 66.5 percent of respondents supported a homegrown nuclear program. That percentage has declined but still hovers between 52.5 percent and 54 percent in polls conducted after the North’s latest nuclear test on Jan. 6.

North Koreans gathering Tuesday at a stadium in their capital, Pyongyang, where portraits of the late leaders Kim Il-Sung, left, and Kim Jong-il, right, were hanging. The stadium hosted a celebration of the birthday anniversary of Kim Jong-il. CreditWong Maye-E/Associated Press

“If we give up securing our own nuclear deterrent for fear of international opposition and depend unilaterally on the United States, we will become nothing but a chess piece manipulated by big powers,” said Cheong Seong-chang, a senior analyst at the Sejong Institute, south of Seoul.

“We need to arm with nuclear weapons so as not to become sandwiched between the United States and China,” he said.

Some advocates of a South Korean nuclear program acknowledge they want to put pressure on China, as frustration grows with Beijing’s inability — or unwillingness — to rein in its North Korean ally.

Ms. Park has invested heavily in building a strategic partnership with China. But when Seoul asked Beijing to strengthen sanctions on the North, it was told to restrain itself. China also demanded that South Korea stop negotiating the deployment of an advanced American missile-defense system, saying it threatened its security.

After the North’s latest nuclear test, Ms. Park did not publicly admonish or discourage the hawkish wing of her party, though she did reaffirm South Korea’s commitment to nuclear nonproliferation.

“I fully understand why some go so far as to argue that we should have tactical nuclear weapons,” she told a news conference last month. “But I have emphasized many times that a nuclear-free world should start in the Korean Peninsula and that there should be no nuclear weapons there.”

South Korean officials and analysts alike have long said that the country had too much to lose if it decided to go nuclear. Its exports-dependent economy would founder under international sanctions if it left the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And it could trigger an arms race in the region.

It would be a “profoundly wrongheaded and even tragic” move that would seriously undermine South Korea’s alliance with the United States and make it less secure, said Jonathan D. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.

Such warnings aside, the fear of being abandoned by the Americans has deep roots here. From an early age, South Koreans are taught that Korea was betrayed by the former Soviet Union and the United States after World War II, leading to a divided Korean Peninsula.

In the 1970s, when South Korea feared the United States might withdraw troops from Asia after its pullout from Vietnam, its then-dictator, Park Chung-hee, Ms. Park’s father, set out to build nuclear arms. He recruited expatriate Korean scientists from the United States and signed a contract with France to build a nuclear reprocessing plant to make bomb fuel.

Washington learned of the program and forced Mr. Park to give it up, warning that his nuclear ambitions jeopardized the alliance and American aid. Although Mr. Park reportedly vowed to build a nuclear weapon by 1981, it remained unclear how far South Korea had gotten before it abandoned that goal.

Mr. Park, remembered for his mantra of “self-reliant defense,” remains a revered figure among the South Korean conservative establishment. Although the country has since repeatedly disavowed a desire to join the nuclear club, its scientists had transgressed International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards by experimenting with reprocessing in 1982 and with enrichment in 2000.

Mr. Cheong, the Sejong Institute analyst, said at this point South Korea could build a nuclear weapon within 18 months.

After the North’s satellite launch this month, Won Yoo-chul, the floor leader of Ms. Park’s Saenuri Party, called for nuclear arms “for self-defense.” Its chief policy coordinator, Kim Jung-hoon, urged the government to negotiate with Washington for the right to reprocess the spent fuel from the country’s nuclear power plants to glean plutonium for weapons.

Some nationalists have argued, unsuccessfully, that if the United States will not permit South Korea to have nuclear weapons, it should at least allow it to acquire a plutonium stockpile and sensitive nuclear technology to maintain a recessed weapons capability.

During the Cold War, the United States kept hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea. But it withdrew them in 1991 as part of a global nuclear arms reduction. Around that time, the two Koreas also signed an agreement to keep the peninsula free of nuclear weapons.

Now that the North has abandoned that deal, some South Koreans say Washington should at least ensure a nuclear balance on the peninsula by reintroducing tactical atomic weapons. This week, some conservative civic groups began a signature-collecting campaign to urge the government to start negotiations with Washington.

Mr. Pollack said the United States regarded such weapons as essentially irrelevant to contemporary security requirements. And Han Min-koo, the South Korean defense minister, told Parliament this week that the combined allied deterrent, including the “nuclear umbrella” the Americans provided, was enough to protect the country.

Washington has dispatched B-52 bombers, a nuclear submarine and F-22Raptor stealth jets to South Korea, a display of allied “extended deterrence” designed in part to dispel the call for nuclear weapons.

“It is unnecessary because the United States is absolutely committed to South Korea’s security and to its defense,” Antony J. Blinken, deputy secretary of state, said in a recent interview. “I think the international community would not look favorably on it.”

Yet many here doubt Washington’s allegiance. The recent contention by Donald J. Trump, the Republic presidential candidate, that South Korea was not paying enough to help maintain 28,500 American troops here has only fueled those misgivings.

“We must ask ourselves whether the United States will save Seoul at the risk of sacrificing L.A. or San Francisco,” Chung Mong-joon, a former head of the governing party, wrote in a widely circulated blog post, warning of the North’s potential for striking the United States with a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile.

An editorial in the Chosun Ilbo this month advised South Korea to study the path Israel took to becoming a de facto nuclear power. “We can no longer depend on the uncertain American nuclear umbrella,” it said.

(Source : nytimes.com)

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