Rising threats from Pyongyang reignite debate in South Korea on need for nuclear arms

SEOUL – In a move that has sparked anew the nuclear debate in South Korea, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un showed off a uranium enrichment facility in an undisclosed location for the first time on Sept 13.

He also vowed to “exponentially increase” his regime’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

This was a day after North Korea fired several

short-range ballistic missiles into the sea between the Korean peninsula and Japan on Sept 12

and hours after it floated yet another batch of trash balloons into South Korea. 

On Sept 8, Mr Kim also unveiled a new 12-axle transporter erector launcher which could be used to launch a new, longer-range missile that can potentially reach the United States. 

These overt displays of nuclear weapons prowess from the North have reignited the long-running debate within South Korea on whether it should have its own nuclear arms to bolster its defences.

Seoul now depends on its ally, the US, for protection against the North’s nuclear threat.

Some analysts are questioning if South Korea can afford to remain reliant on the US for protection in the face of growing threats and the prospect of former US president Donald Trump returning to the White House after the Nov 5 presidential election. 

South Korea’s deputy national security director Kim Tae-hyo said during a forum on Sept 3 that the re-election of Trump could “weaken the US nuclear umbrella”.

“Trump as a presidential candidate can be seen as one who would pursue transactional benefits in terms of the South Korea-US alliance,” Mr Kim was reported as saying. “It is not unlikely that he would suggest negotiating defence cost-sharing or the deployment of US strategic assets from a cost perspective.”

A Reuters poll conducted after the presidential debate on Sept 10 showed US Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, in a slight 5 percentage point lead over Trump, with 47 per cent to his 42 per cent.

In the Indo-Pacific region, South Korea, together with Japan and Australia, is under the protection of the US nuclear umbrella, an extended deterrence in which the US commits to defending an ally using the full range of its military capabilities including nuclear weapons.

South Korea gave up its nuclear weapons development programme in 1975 when it joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which prohibits the development of nuclear weapons.

The Institute for National Security Strategy (INSS), South Korea’s state-run think tank, which is affiliated with the country’s National Intelligence Service, released a report in June after a summit between North Korea’s Mr Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin, recommending that Seoul consider building its own nuclear capabilities.

At a briefing for the foreign media on Sept 10, INSS director of North Korea studies Byun Sang-jung expressed conviction that the time has come for South Korea to go nuclear.

“Chairman Kim has been developing the nuclear warhead for a long time, and they have successfully made it light and small, which is clearly targeted at South Korea. So knowing this, for how long can the South Korean government be patient for the world to let us have nuclear capabilities?” he said.

Calling the situation a matter of life and death for “our children”, Dr Byun pointed out that there are increasing voices supporting South Korea’s development of nuclear capability so that it can be on a par with North Korea.

A poll by the Korea Institute for National Unification released in late June showed that nearly 66 per cent of South Koreans supported the idea of the country having its own nuclear weapons.

More than half of respondents believed that US-South Korea ties would deteriorate if Trump returned to office. 

Recent remarks by senior South Korean government officials have also fuelled speculation that the government may be looking to go nuclear.

At the Seoul Defence Dialogue, a multilateral security forum that took place on Sept 10 to 11, newly appointed Korean Defence Minister Kim Yong-hyun said “all options are open” for defending national security. His words were widely seen as hinting at the possibility of South Korea acquiring nuclear weapons.

The former three-star army general had already made similar remarks on his first day on the job on Aug 15 in response to a media query. 

“Under the Yoon administration, our alliance with the US has been elevated to a ‘nuclear-based’ alliance. We respond to North Korean nuclear threats based on the US nuclear umbrella and extended deterrence – that’s the bottom line,” he had told reporters.

But if that was not sufficient as a deterrent against the North Korean threat, added Mr Kim, then “all options have to remain open” as the “safety of South Koreans is our ultimate priority”.

Mr Kim is known for his long-held pro-nuclear stance, having once declared during a seminar in 2020 that “there is no survival or future for us (South Korea) without nuclear weapons”. 

As North Korea continues to build its nuclear arsenal and increases its rhetorical threats against the South, Seoul’s senior officials’ recent comments could be a way of preparing the public for the possibility of the country developing nuclear weapons should the crisis with the North worsen or the US-South Korea alliance degrade dramatically, said associate professor of international politics Mason Richey from Seoul’s Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

He said that “South Korea is right to take all of its potential steps into consideration” because of the “uncertain and strange times currently”.

However, Prof Richey is of the view that it is highly unlikely that South Korea would move towards developing nuclear weapons in the next five years as there is not yet enough consensus within the country to take this step. 

Concurring, Dr Bong Young-shik, from the Institute for North Korean Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, said that, unlike North Korea, South Korea is very dependent on international trade and hence vulnerable to economic sanctions from the international community should it decide to develop nuclear weapons. 

“Any move by South Korea seen as violating the NPT would generate not just controversy, but also lead to an extremely disastrous impact on its economy.”

He believes that it would be easier for South Korea to move towards nuclear latency, which refers to having the technical capability to develop nuclear weapons without actually doing so. This would involve the US allowing South Korea to reprocess the uranium in spent nuclear fuel up to a low level of purity, far below the weapons-grade purity of 90 per cent.

“This would have a more persuasive effect,” said Dr Bong, because Japan is already being allowed to reprocess spent uranium. 

“It may not be sufficient, but if it does happen, it can be seen as an important first step in the right direction,” he said.