South Korea Reveals The Dangers Of Nuclearization
South Korea, a stable U.S. ally, proved that even economically successful and democratic nations can implode at a moment’s notice. Such instability would only be exacerbated if South Korea were a nuclear weapons state.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is in jail, sitting through his impeachment trial, after his ill-fated December attempt to declare martial law.
With Yoon fighting the charges and the Prime Minister who stepped in on his arrest also impeached, control of the government and its powerful military still hangs in the balance. Imagine how terrifying this upheaval would be if South Korea also had nuclear weapons.
This is yet another reminder that the spread of nuclear weapons is a danger to world security. More fingers on the button leads to more uncertainty, and more danger that the button will get pushed.
The Next Nuclear-Armed Power?
A nuclear-armed South Korea is not far-fetched. Facing threats from a nuclear-armed North Korea, and with doubts about the reliability of U.S. protection, some two-thirds of the South Korean public and major figures in the currently ruling political party want the country to build its nuclear weapons.
statements from President Trump and his team are raising new doubts about whether America will defend its allies, heightening South Korean anxiety. With its advanced civilian nuclear technologies, South Korea would be capable of doing so, though it would be costly and take time, since none of the needed facilities are in place.
For decades, the United States has opposed the spread of nuclear weapons to any country, and worked to strengthen the global regime based around the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which legally prohibits all non-nuclear-armed states from getting nuclear weapons. But President Trump has expressed a different view, telling an interviewer in 2016 that we would be “better off” if South Korea and Japan had nuclear weapons of their own to defend themselves, and that “it’s only a question of time” before those countries get nuclear weapons.
Some experts and some of Trump’s latest nominees have argued that a nuclear-armed South Korea would better deter North Korea and free up additional U.S. forces to counter China. However, it is important to consider the vulnerabilities South Korea would face on the way to armament.
The Long Road To Nuclearization
First, a South Korean move toward nuclear weapons would likely provoke a crisis with North Korea, and probably with China as well.
The sanctions China imposed on Korea after it deployed U.S.-provided missile defenses would be a picnic compared to China’s reaction to a bomb program. In the years before South Korea got a survivable nuclear force, its effort would be deeply vulnerable to preventive attack, from either China or North Korea. That situation would likely require a buildup of U.S. forces rather than permitting the reduction that some on the Trump team hope for.
Second, South Korea joining North Korea in abandoning its NPT obligations would increase incentives for other countries to follow suit. Japan, which already has large stocks of plutonium and advanced nuclear technology, may be next in line.
Such moves would weaken the NPT system, already under challenge from the collapse of great-power cooperation on nonproliferation, Iran’s march to the edge of a nuclear weapon capability, and more.
Third, nuclear weapons in more places would mean more places where things could go disastrously wrong.
Long ago, the United States was supplying the Shah of Iran’s civilian nuclear program, despite concerns about the Shah’s nuclear weapons ambitions, because he was a reliable American ally. When he was overthrown, Washington was struggling to find ways to stop his successors in Iran from getting the bomb.
Imagine the security nightmare the world would now face if the United States had allowed the Shah nuclear weapons, which then would have been taken over by the Islamic Republic.
A Story of Two Coups
In 1991, when hard-line communists staged a coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, there were frightening hours when no one knew who was in charge of over 30,000 nuclear weapons, and enough nuclear material for tens of thousands more. When the Soviet Union broke apart a few months later, chaos engulfed many nuclear facilities, leading to thefts of potential nuclear bomb material.
It took years, billions of dollars, and a great deal of creative diplomacy to secure the Soviet nuclear arsenal and persuade Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to transfer the nuclear weapons they inherited to a then-friendlier Russia for dismantlement, so that only one nuclear-armed state emerged from the Soviet wreckage.
The world can ill afford another “loose nukes” crisis from the collapse of a nuclear-armed state.
Such government crises are not rare, the coup attempt in Turkey in 2016, for example, raised doubts about the security of the U.S. nuclear weapons reportedly stored at a base there. What might happen in the coming century? Even in the next few decades, the possibility of state collapse is not out of the question in countries illegally possessing nuclear weapons.
In Conclusion
In short, “reliable” allies might not stay that way forever, and the global effort to stem the spread of nuclear weapons was designed to be even-handed: the NPT bars all parties who don’t have nuclear weapons from acquiring them, and requires all of them to accept International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections, whether they are American friends or not.
Any effort to help South Korea on the path to the bomb would be a clear violation of legal obligations the United States led the way in creating.
South Korea’s political upheaval ought to be a wake-up call, helping us all remember a basic fact: nuclear weapons pose desperate dangers wherever they may be. In today’s world, where nuclear risk is the highest it has been in decades, we do not need more fingers on the nuclear button, especially when those fingers might not be as steady as we once believed.
Matthew Bunn is the James R. Schlesinger Professor of the Practice of Energy, National Security, and Foreign Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the Co-Principal Investigator of the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Jason Ren Jeun Lee is a research assistant with the Project on Managing the Atom and a Master in Public Policy candidate at Harvard Kennedy School specializing in International and Global Affairs.
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