If South Korea Goes Nuclear, Then What? – OpEd

By

Several questions may be asked before welcoming Seoul to the nuclear weapons club. By Toby Dalton a senior fellow and co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and George Perkovich, the Japan Chair for a World Without nuclear weapons at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

During his confirmation hearing earlier this month, South Korean Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun argued that acquiring nuclear weapons is “among all possible options” for responding to North Korea’s growing nuclear threat, the latest signal that Seoul is normalizing the idea of becoming a nuclear weapons state. Political leaders in South Korea regularly flirt with going nuclear, whether to signal toughness for domestic audiences, to intimidate North Korea, or to seek alliance bargaining leverage over Washington. In recent years, notable American scholars and national security establishment and figures have also welcomed the prospect. 

Barely  months ago, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly went so far as to say, “There’s no reason we should object to” South Korea developing its own nuclear weapons. Over the past decade, periodic South Korean public opinion polls have found that a consistent majority supports acquiring nuclear weapons, though relatively few surveys address the costs of doing so. The temptation for South Korea is understandable given its dual fear of attack by its increasingly assertive neighbors and potential abandonment by Washington, particularly if former U.S. President Donald Trump takes office again. For the United States, a South Korea with a survivable nuclear arsenal might shift the burden of dealing with North Korea and free up U.S. resources to contain China. 

But before jumping on the proliferation bandwagon, policymakers in Washington and Seoul should consider several critical questions that are being ignored today. The answers to these questions suggest that the imagined benefits of friendly proliferation do not clearly outweigh the risks. What would it take for South Korea to achieve a survivable nuclear arsenal? Presumably, Seoul would seek to at least match the size of North Korea’s arsenal, which is estimated   to be around 50 nuclear weapons plus the fissile fuel for perhaps another 20. Seoul would also want to ensure that its own arsenal could credibly survive a first strike from North Korea.

Given South Korea’s relatively small size and geography, the most survivable option would be submarine-based nuclear missiles. Yet, procuring submarines capable of carrying such missiles is an expensive, time-consuming challenge. Achieving a survivable arsenal of, say, hundred weapons could take ten or more years from the time Seoul decides to proceed, depending on how Seoul chooses to acquire fissile material and deploy the weapons. This would constitute a long and dangerous window of vulnerability for South Korea, during which its primary adversaries, North Korea and China, would have incentive to slow its progress by attacking its nuclear facilities. In the years it would take South Korea to build up a nuclear deterrent, should the United States protect South Korea from attack? Naturally, Seoul would hope that its biggest ally would maintain its extended deterrence promises and deployment of forces as South Korea builds an arsenal. 

Why Washington Is Encouraging South Korea To Go Nuclear  

This would put Washington in a peculiar position. Having spent decades trying to prevent South Korea and others from acquiring nuclear weapons, the United States would now be asked to risk American lives at a particularly dicey moment to defend a nuclear-armed South Korea whose acquisition of these weapons was supposed to make U.S. defense unnecessary.

A majority of the U.S. Congress and electorate would likely conclude that a nuclear South Korea should defend itself and U.S. forces should come home from the Korean Peninsula after 72 years. As U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham once boldly put it “If there’s going to be a war to stop Kim Jong Un it will be over there. If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die here. When your president of the United States, where does your allegiance lie? To the people of the United States.” The sort of retrenchment implied by Graham’s statement would, of course, call into question the credibility of U.S. security pledges to allies and partners worldwide. 

Could South Korean nuclear weapons make war in Northeast Asia more likely, and would the U.S. inevitably get sucked into it. Humanity’s limited history with nuclear-armed adversaries suggests that the first 10 to 20 years after acquisition are scary: The United States and the Soviet Union faced nuclear crises over Berlin in 1961 and Cuba in 1962. A few years after Israel acquired nuclear weapons, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 triggered a Defcon 3 alert in the United States—potentially one of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War.

Following Pakistan’s nuclearization, India and Pakistan fought the Kargil War in 1999, and after a terror attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, the two countries were brought to the brink of war once again. If South Korea is acquiring nuclear weapons, North Korea and China would be expected to try to impose costs on Seoul or prevent it entirely, while leaders in Seoul could be emboldened to push back harder or take greater risks. By adding to instability, at least initially, South Korean nuclearization would increase risks of war—and it is folly to think that U.S. policymakers and military forces would not be drawn in one way or another. 

Will Washington Impose Sanctions If South Korea Goes Nuclear?

Will Washington impose sanctions if South Korea builds a nuclear force? South Korean nuclearization would put the U.S. president in a difficult position: Sanction a close ally and risk the future of the alliance, or try to skirt sanctions and damage the U.S. ability to prevent future proliferation elsewhere. If any state, including South Korea, moves to acquire nuclear weapons, the U.S. executive branch is legally compelled to impose a slate of painful economic and military sanctions.

The most specific and sweeping of these is the Glenn Amendment, which would terminate foreign assistance, defense sales, and military financing; deny U.S. credits or guarantees; require opposition to multilateral lending; and prohibit certain types of technology exports if South Korea were to test a nuclear device. The amendment has no waiver provision, meaning that an act of Congress would be required to rescind the sanctions. Seoul might be tempted to try to evade sanctions through deception or clandestine activity, but the odds are low of avoiding detection for long by intelligence services, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, or open-source sleuths.  Given the difficulty of avoiding sanctions, South Korean politicians, business leaders, and voters would need to consider the potential costs of sanctions more than they have to date. 

Proponents of the bomb tend to wave these costs away, arguing that the South Korean economy is too important to be sanctioned. Yet South Korean National Security Advisor Shin Won-sik recently warned that proliferation would cause “an immediate shock in our financial market.” China would likely impose sanction when South Korea deployed U.S. ballistic missile defenses over Chinese objections, which cost the South Korean economy an estimated eight billion. 

One could imagine China taking a more punitive approach toward both South Korea and the United States in retaliation for an even bigger aggression. Beyond China, even if the United States found ways to avoid sanctioning South Korea, European countries and other anti-nuclear G-20 states might also pile on. Alternatively, South Korean leaders and businesses could press U.S. leaders and Congress to amend nonproliferation laws or exempt South Korea from them. The George W. Bush administration, for instance, made a deal with India in 2005 to enable it to purchase foreign nuclear power plants and then spent the next three years negotiating with New Delhi and Congress to remove sanctions and other legal and policy impediments. 

India’s Cautionary Deal

Yet the India nuclear deal provides a cautionary tale. One of the architects and major proponents of that deal, Ashley J. Tellis, wrote recently that it has fallen far short of the overly lofty expectations on which it was sold: India has yet to purchase any American nuclear reactors or fully align itself in U.S.-led efforts to contain China.

Could American policymakers be sure that a nuclear South Korea would follow through on any promises it made to secure similar favorable treatment? For the United States, skirting the sanctions issue ultimately requires going through Congress. And given the current U.S. political climate, predicting whether and how Washington would manage partisan political realities to rewrite nonproliferation legislation is a fool’s errand. It would be unwise for South Korea to bank on it. What would this mean for preventing future proliferation? That there are only nine nuclear-armed states today owes a great deal to the foresight of U.S. leaders and their Soviet counterparts starting in the 1960s to build a global system to prevent and discourage states from seeking nuclear weapons.

However, if the United States were to effectively abandon this system in favor of a carve-out policy for proliferation by allies, then it is not difficult to imagine some states going nuclear in short order. The United States has already loosened or amended longstanding nonproliferation norms and rules to benefit its partners India, Australia and now possibly Saudi Arabia. This has intensified suspicions in China, Russia, and elsewhere that the nonproliferation regime is neither universal nor rules-based, but rather a U.S. tool to contain or weaken its adversaries. 

If Washington tolerated or even abetted South Korean proliferation, many other countries would join Moscow and Beijing in decrying this as another example of U.S. hypocrisy in claiming to be a champion of a rules-based international system. China and Russia would then have a powerful incentive and precedent to look the other way or even assist U.S. adversaries in acquiring nuclear weapons to even the score.

Reasons For South Korea To Enter The Nuclear Club

There is reasonable argument to a enter nuclear club.  Arguments for South Korea to acquire nuclear weapons, not least the nuclear threats it faces from a hostile North Korea. But there are real dangers in doing so. The trickiest period would be the first decade or two while a newly nuclear-armed Seoul and its adversaries sort out how they are going to manage the new reality.

Perhaps the Koreas would muddle through without crises, but the enduring conflict on the Peninsula doesn’t inspire confidence that this will be the case. As scholars and officials involved in nuclear affairs have long noted, an increase in the number of actors possessing nuclear weapons raises the risk of arms races, crises, and nuclear use across the board. Nuclear conflict anywhere will upset international relations and domestic psychology everywhere. The world might breathe easier over the prospect if South Korean advocates of nuclear weapons and their cheerleaders in the United States recognized the challenges raised here and seriously addressed how they would deal with them.

Ambassador Kazi Anwarul Masud

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and ambassador of Bangladesh

One thought on “If South Korea Goes Nuclear, Then What? – OpEd

  • January 25, 2025 at 12:23 am
    Permalink

    This article misses the critical point, nuclear proliferation was not initiated by the United States. The initial rationale of the American nuclear umbrella was to provide allied non- nuclear states with protection against the only other substantive nuclear power, that posed a threat; that being the Russian Empire.

    Times have changed, the proliferation genie is now out of the bottle, thanks to the covert support given by China and Russia to rogue states trying to acquire this technology.

    The question now arises, will America provide non-nuclear allied countries with nuclear protection, against multiple nuclear threats? Or phrased another way; will America risk annihilation of its own cities every time a rogue state threatens to nuke its neighbor?

    Clearly the answer to this is no. That leaves non-nuclear states, facing threats from a nuclear state, with little option, other than to acquire a nuclear deterrence capability.

    Tragically, this is where we at now: Ukraine, if it survives will acquire nuclear weapons, as will Poland, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and eventually many others.

    China and Russia let the nuclear proliferation genie out of the bottle by not enforcing non-proliferation measures against other rogue states. Russia has compounded this by threatening to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, to achieve a political end. As a consequence, this planet will now pay the horrendous cost that may well end civilization as we know it and billions of souls.

    Good one Russia and China, short term political gain, long term global pain!

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *