South Koreans and international observers are struggling to remember a time when the tension on the Korean peninsula has been higher. We have seen North Korea sending trash balloons into South Korea, including over the Blue House. In response, Seoul resumed loudspeaker broadcasts towards the North. In recent days, we have even seen North Korea send over 7,000 troops to reinforce Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
As the possibility of a conflict looms ever larger on the Korean peninsula, we must start to consider the nuclear situation. North Korea’s status as a nuclear state has created one of the most precarious geopolitical situations. The fundamental challenge is that North Korea’s nuclear program has served as the regime’s lifeline, giving the rogue state an asymmetrical advantage. By all measures, the North’s conventional forces are small in number, lacking both experience and training, and they are poorly equipped. However, they are currently gaining battlefield experience in Ukraine. In contrast, the South Korean army is well supplied, trained, and constantly reinforced. This mismatch would force the Kim regime to look for any advantage possible. Any spark could explode into a mushroom cloud.
Kim Jong Un has recently visited a uranium enrichment facility, once again reminding the world of the nuclear threat posed by the North Korean regime. Kim’s visit to the uranium enrichment facility shocked the experts and the public alike. Before this trip only Sig Hecker – former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory- had seen the inside of a North Korean nuclear site during his trips, starting in 2004. According to more recent reports, North Korea has enough material to create at least 10 nuclear weapons. It is important to remember it only takes one nuclear attack to wipe any major city off the map. These reports come as another nuclear test is expected before November. Kim’s saber rattling has, once again, raised the question of nuclear armament for South Korea.
Soothing an Anxious Alliance
The idea of going nuclear is gaining traction within the South Korean public as well as among experts. Obtaining a nuclear weapon used to divide both groups, but the recent rise in tensions has caused a dramatic shift in public opinion. According to recent polling over 65% of the South Korean public are in favor of obtaining native nuclear capabilities. However, this increased support is fueled by an increasingly complex reality. Rather than this support being an actual cry for nuclear weapons, the desire for domestically controlled nuclear armaments can be seen as the South Koreans expressing their fears of US abandonment in the face of a bellicose North Korea. Amongst the ongoing risk of US isolationism, South Koreans have endured escalating and ongoing North Korean taunts: trash balloons, missile tests, and drone incursions. If these provocations were not enough to instill fear into the hearts of South Koreans, former President Trump has promised to massively increase the cost of US troops stationed in South Korea, if not just withdraw the troops entirely. To assuage South Korean calls for pursuing a nuclear weapon – or even nuclear latency – the United States must move to reassure population, and other allies in the region, that the US is not only a reliable ally but that the US is still a major military power.
Washington has not been deaf to changing South Korean sentiment. The US under the Biden Administration has taken steps to reassure Seoul of its defensive commitments through steps like the Washington Declaration in 2023. The Washington Declaration established the Nuclear Consultative Group (NGC), which is aimed at strengthening extended deterrents, discussing nuclear planning, and managing proliferation threats. Rather than pushing South Korea to pursue nuclear capabilities, the US should continue to reassure its ally through the bilateral institutions it has created. However, the November election does threaten to drastically change the U.S.’s global posture.
One of the questions that has been looming large in strategic planning circles and other policy groups is if the US would trade a major city like Los Angeles or San Francisco for Seoul in the case that North Korea starts a nuclear war. The issue with the question is that it simply skips over deterrents. Ultimately, the nuclear armament of South Korea would attempt to serve as a deterrent rather than a wartime contingency. In the case of a nuclear strike from North Korea, Washington would be forced to respond. The US has a large nuclear umbrella, with the ability to carry out a strike anywhere in the world in a moment’s notice. The question is not “Can South Korea and its allies go blow for blow with Kim Jong Un?”, but rather “can they prevent this conflict from ever reaching that stage?”
The Nuclear Pathway
South Korea is not only still technically at war with its neighbor to the North, it is also the last remaining non-nuclear state in East Asia. To the north, both China and North Korea are nuclear states, and looking to the east Japan and Taiwan are both nuclear latent states. Nuclear latency is defined by the Wilson Center as “Nuclear latency can be viewed as the possession of many or all of the technologies, facilities, materials, expertise (including tacit knowledge), resources and other capabilities necessary for the development of nuclear weapons, without full operational weaponization”. The idea is that these states have walked right up to the line of full nuclearization but stopped just short. This non-armament may seem like an odd decision for a state to make, but it comes with several distinct advantages.
The first key advantage is that the country can avoid sanctions. There are a slew of sanctions that are automatically applied to states that attempt to go nuclear. We have seen some of these UNSC sanctions implemented against Iran and North Korea. Stopping short of violating the nonproliferation treaty (NPT) is vital for an export-led economy like Japan’s.
The second major advantage of nuclear latency is that being a nuclear latent state can serve as a deterrent against foreign attackers. The risk of any conflict escalating to a nuclear level will be enough to push opposing sides to the negotiating table rather than the battlefield, though this theory is contested.
Both of these advantages become complicated in the South Korean context. While nuclear latency can prevent full-blown sanctions, South Korea would spend immense political capital on the international stage to achieve such a feat. Technically, the NPT does allow for states to pursue latency, but specific activities, like trading high enriched uranium, remain tightly monitored. While purchasing highly enriched uranium may be an option, the international community keeps a keen eye on who is doing the purchasing and their motivation for doing so. Any country pursuing nuclear latency would be turning up the heat in every international relationship, including with North Korea and the US. The US has previously dissuaded South Korea from obtaining nuclear capabilities during the Park regime, during the Cold War. South Korea moving towards nuclear latency would be choosing to disrupt a significant amount of its relationships around the world, jeopardizing its own trade.
As mentioned previously, the assumption that nuclear latency deters conflicts is still debated to this day. The field of nuclear policy suffers from a lack of publicly available data and scholarship, but experts generally understand nuclear latency as having a deterring effect. The literature will often consider the deterring effect of nuclear latency in an abstract vacuum with an abstract potential aggressor. The state in question will rarely already be embroiled in conflict. The situation on the Korean peninsula is not quite as simple. The two sides are still at war and are currently escalating the chance of direct conflict. In this scenario, nuclear latency is another escalation. It is being used rhetorically by South Korea and those watching, in a manner where the steps towards nuclear latency do not need to be taken for the statement to influence the conflict. Considerations of South Korea gaining a native nuclear capacity has already impacted the tone of the dialogues between the North and South. Furthermore, it has increased the amount of attention that the US is willing to give this issue.
This pattern of winding up and down has been a staple on the peninsula for the last few decades. In many ways the yo-yo-ing of tensions can be seen as a stabilizing pattern in the region, given the decades of peace on the peninsula. South Korea gaining a nuclear bomb, or even nuclear latency, would ratchet up the tensions from which there is no release. Rather than risking geopolitical and economic isolation, South Korea needs to lean on its allies in the region and across the world to ensure not just the survival of the South Korean state but also prosperity for its citizens and trade partners.