In the face of threats from Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, many South Koreans now want to go nuclear.
That’s regardless of enhanced “guidelines for nuclear deterrence” signed by U.S. and South Korean officials on the sidelines of this week’s NATO summit in Washington, at which South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol warned against Russia providing “advanced technology” for North Korean weapons capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
The White House said President Biden pledged “the full range of U.S. capabilities including nuclear” while Yoon promised the Republic of Korea would “greatly contribute to the Alliance’s combined defense posture.” The new guidelines, said the South’s Yonhap News, were designed “to help assuage deepening security concerns in South Korea and reaffirm Seoul’s commitment to the non-nuclear proliferation regime,”
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The carefully crafted verbiage was not likely, however, to head off fears that Donald Trump, if he returns to the White House, will undermine the U.S.-Korean alliance while sucking up to Russia’s President Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
“The anxiety level in Korea about the reliability, staying power, and deterrence commitment of the U.S. is high,” said Evans Revere, a former senior U.S. diplomat in Seoul and Tokyo. “At its core, the concern is about Trump and the possibility he would abandon the ROK,” as threatened during his presidency. “At the least,” Revere told The Daily Beast, he might “unilaterally draw down U.S. forces,” about 28,500 troops, mostly soldiers and airmen, while the new Russian-North Korean treaty makes the North “a de facto permanent nuclear power.”
Against the nuclear threat posed by the North, one South Korean woman, Na Kyung-won, is running for leader of the ruling People Power Party, and fighting for South Korea to develop its own nukes. Meanwhile, Trump is threatening to pull out U.S. troops if elected in November and Putin is providing expertise and technology for North Korean missiles capable of dropping warheads on the South.
A former judge who is married to a judge, Na is marshaling a campaign that polls indicate has rising support among South Koreans, to whom Trump represents almost as much of a security threat as Putin.
Sure, the alliance between the U.S. and South Korea, “is functioning as a deterrent,” she said while announcing her candidacy for party leadership, “but it cannot guarantee changes in the future security environment.” She wants the U.S., which has blocked South Korea from developing nukes for anything other than energy, to jettison that policy.
That’s a polite way of expressing widespread misgivings about Trump, who during his first term demanded that South Korea pay $5 billion a year to cover the cost of American troops defending South Korea. That demand jeopardized the future of America’s largest U.S. base overseas, Camp Humphreys, 40 miles south of Seoul, and nearby Osan Air Base. The Biden administration got the South to agree to pay $1 billion, as originally proposed.
It was on June 25, the 74th anniversary of the North Korean invasion of the South, that Na “kicked a hornets’ nest that shows no signs of dying down” by declaring that South Korea should become a nuclear power. NK News, a Seoul-based website that tracks both Koreas, reported her as saying, “Now we have to arm ourselves with nuclear weapons too.” Conservatives “rallied behind Na’s position,” NK News said, “reigniting a debate about nuclear weapons that had largely faded into the background since the allies sought to nip the issue in the bud last year.”
The party, though, is fractured for other reasons. Na has fallen out with President Yoon for joining in criticism of Yoon’s wife for accepting a $2,200 Dior handbag as a gift—and for supporting a scheme that did not have his approval, for rewarding couples for having babies. Since South Korea’s constitution bans a president from serving more than one five-year term, however, she will not have to run against him for their party’s nomination for president in 2027.
At 60, Na has earned her conservative credentials battling through the maelstrom of Korean politics, failing twice to become mayor of Seoul but being elected five times to the National Assembly, most recently in April when the opposition Democratic Party gained considerably more assembly seats than her People Power Party.
The first woman to head the assembly’s foreign affairs committee, Na is all for the war games with the Americans that President Yoon has enthusiastically endorsed, and for improving South Korea’s relations with Japan. She faced criticism for attending a Japanese reception in Seoul to mark the anniversary of Japan’s military establishment, known as the Self-Defense Forces, and has called for an end to the controversy over Koreans forced to serve as “comfort women” for Japanese soldiers in World War II. Na, whose daughter has Down syndrome, has led Korean organizations for those with disabilities and chaired the Korean Special Olympics.
The debate over South Korean nukes picked up steam when Trump discussed his great relationship not only with Putin but also with Kim, with whom he professed to have fallen “in love” at their summit in Singapore in June 2018.
Among the worst concerns is that a future President Trump might try to get Putin to settle for holding on to what he’s got in Ukraine in return for ending the war—and relief from sanctions. Trump, according to this scenario, would resume his love affair with Kim while bargaining for a deal to scale down or even end war games and missile tests.
Experts debate, however, the degree to which a nuclear arsenal would contribute to the defense of the South. “We are all walking into Kim’s political warfare trap,” David Maxwell, a retired army colonel who served five tours in South Korea with the special forces, told The Daily Beast. “Neither U.S. nuclear weapons in the ROK nor the ROK’s development of its own nuclear weapons will significantly contribute to deterrence.”
Kim “is looking at these debates with pleasure because they support his major objective of dividing the alliance,” Maxwell said. “Those calling for nuclear weapons in the ROK are supporting KJU’s political warfare strategy and are actually contributing to the weakening of deterrence.”
Maxwell is just as skeptical about the return to South Korea of American nukes, which then President George H.W. Bush withdrew in 1991, as he is of the South making its own nuclear weapons. Kim, he believes, “will simply exploit their presence for his own political warfare campaign… generating widespread anti-nuclear protests wherever these weapons are located.”
Right now, according to a detailed study by Victor Cha, a leading Korea expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, South Koreans are fearful of the international repercussions of going nuclear, including the fallout from withdrawal from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. A Trump victory in November, however, could bring about a shift that would persuade the South it had to match the North’s nuclear stockpile, estimated at 100 warheads, with nukes of its own.
“If Trump wins and pulls out troops or cuts an ICBM deal with Kim that decouples from short and medium range ballistic missiles,” Cha told The Daily Beast, “then strategic elite opinions could change” and “policy could shift swiftly.”
The shift has been underway ever since Kim and Putin hugged at the Vostochny Cosmodrome near the Amur River in Siberia last September and Putin agreed to sell the Russians millions of artillery shells, plus other munitions, for Russian forces in Ukraine.
“After a lull, South Korea is suddenly talking about going nuclear again,” reports NK News. “Leading conservatives are endorsing nukes to defend against North Korea, reigniting debate about reliance on US military.”
Pressure to go nuclear gained urgency after Putin and Kim signed a mutual defense pact in Pyongyang last month, promising to fight for each other in a future war. Assuming Russia “is providing technology” for the North’s satellite program, writes Korea expert Angela Stent at the Brookings Institution in Washington, “Russia may well assist Kim in further developing his nuclear weapons program”—a matter “of great concern to China, South Korea, the United States, and other Asian and European countries.”
Revere sees the confrontation cutting both ways.
“A lot of domestic polling in the ROK suggests strong popular support for either a nuclear-armed South Korea or the re-introduction of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons into the ROK,” he told The Daily Beast. “There is a vocal domestic constituency in South Korea that is pushing for the country to go nuclear.”
Trump “has made his contempt for Korea and his anti-U.S.-ROK alliance views clear,” Revere observes, and “has spoken positively about his relations with those three dictators”—Kim, Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping. Thus, “one can understand why the anxiety level among South Koreans is high.”
However, Revere notes, “None of the polling that I’ve seen asks Koreans the tough questions about the implications of going nuclear, including the need to withdraw from the NPT, the implications of such a move on South Korea’s international standing, the fact that this would effectively put an end to the goal (however remote) of denuclearizing North Korea.”
Then, Revere adds yet another hazard—“the possibility that anti-alliance MAGA forces”—that is, Trumpsters allied around the slogan, Make America Great Again—“would seize on this move to reduce the U.S. military commitment or even end the alliance, arguing that Korea can now take care of itself.”
Trump, however, is hardly inspiring confidence in the U.S. commitment to defend the South in a second Korean War.
“Some believe that the establishment officials in Washington would prevent Trump from pulling US troops from the Korean Peninsula and making other moves that he hinted at,” a former South Korean ambassador to Russia, Wi Sung-lac, told the Korea Herald. “ That may have been the case during the first-term Trump administration,” he said, “but if Trump is back in the White House, things are going to be quite different.”
The Herald reported “conservative leaders” as “joining the hitherto fringe club of politicians calling for South Korea to get its own nuclear weapons to counter growing North Korean and other security threats facing the country.” Or, as one national assembly member, Yu Yong-woon, put it in careful understatement, “securing potential nuclear capabilities.”
