Concern about US security guarantees has prompted debate in South Korea over the possibility of redeploying US tactical nuclear weapons – or building some themselves.
Comments by influential South Koreans that their country should consider requesting the return of US nuclear weapons to their shores—or even acquire its own nuclear weapons—reflects persistent unease about how regional security developments are challenging US extended security guarantees developed during the Cold War.
In the case of South Korea, the United States pledged through a bilateral mutual defence treaty to help defend the country from an external attack, presumably from North Korea, with nuclear weapons if necessary. The deployment of sizeable US conventional forces in South Korea was aimed at making these extended security guarantees more credible.
The effectiveness of deterrence is difficult to prove, since by definition nothing happens. If a country is deterred from attacking, it is a non-event. Sceptics can plausibly argue that perhaps the presumed aggressor never intended to attack, or at least refrained from the assault for other reasons. Still, the North Korean invasion of the South was never repeated, perhaps due to US threats to retaliate—something that was lacking before June 1950.
Extended deterrence is a function of capacity, will, and perception. It requires that the guarantor has the capacity to defend another country under attack as well as the intent to do so, and this capacity-will combination must be perceived by the target as sufficiently strong that the potential aggressor decides to refrain.
In addition to deterring a potential aggressor through threats of retaliation, a deterrence pledge also involves an assurance dimension. The state receiving the guarantee must perceive it as credible given the guarantor’s capacity and will. Otherwise, it will seek to appease the potential aggressor—or balance the threat through unilateral action.
In the case of South Korea, the means of unilateral balancing under consideration has extended to include nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, the United States stationed hundreds of nuclear weapons there. At times, early South Korean governments contemplated and even started nuclear weapons programmes.
The Cold War has ended, and the Pentagon removed all US nuclear weapons from South Korea two decades ago. But the commitment to defend the country with nuclear weapons if necessary is still seen as essential to keep South Koreans from losing faith in the US willingness or capacity to defend them.
In one of his last public speeches in Asia before leaving office, then US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates acknowledged to participants at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that several developments relating to North Korea were making the East Asian strategic environment more dangerous.
First, North Korea’s indiscriminate selling of items useful for making nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles was destabilizing ‘the entire region.’ Second, the US homeland was for the first time becoming vulnerable to a direct North Korean attack. Gates related that he and President Barack Obama had told Chinese leaders several times that North Korea’s continued progress in developing long-range ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads was becoming a ‘direct threat to the United States.’
In addition, the risks had increased that any further North Korean provocations against South Korea would rapidly escalate into an armed confrontation between the two parties. Gates also warned that North Korea’s outrageous provocations against the South last year—sinking the Cheonan and shelling civilians on a border island—had so roused South Korean opinion that vigorous retaliation to any further provocations was much more likely. ‘And one of the worries we have dealt with over the last seven or eight months, both with our friends in the Republic of Korea and also in our dialogues with our Chinese friends and other members of the Group of Six is the danger of unpredictable escalation in the event of another provocation,’ he noted.
South Korean Defence Minister Kim Kwan Jin later told the same audience that his government had adopted a policy of ‘proactive deterrence,’ which he said would mean that ‘if there is a provocation, we will respond very strongly.’ Even before last year’s provocations led to a change in military strategy, the government of Lee Myung-bak, which had come to power in 2008, had adopted a much sterner line toward the North than its predecessors. It strictly reduced South Korean financial assistance and demanded an end to both of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programmes.
Although of less immediate concern to most South Koreans, the rising power of China has also been profoundly affecting regional security dynamics. In particular, China’s growing military power has resulted in many East Asian countries deepening their security ties with the United States and building up their defences, including by acquiring ballistic missile defences. In response, the Chinese have tightened their ties with North Korea, which, despite the headaches it causes, is a reliable buffer state. Few South Koreans consider China a military threat, but many worry about its growing economic presence in North Korea.
South Korean security experts have cited several other reasons why they believe that US extended deterrence guarantees have become less credible during the last two decades. For example, they point to the withdrawal of the US troops that had been stationed along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, where they had served as a trip-wire ensuring that any North Koreas cross-border incursions would meet a US response, to below the Han River. Furthermore, the number of US troops based in South Korea continues to decline from Cold War highs. South Koreans are also concerned that the United States might seek to negotiate a nuclear elimination deal with Pyongyang at their own country’s expense.
Finally, the Obama administration’s nuclear weapons elimination rhetoric alarms them, especially the way the April 2010 US Nuclear Posture Review modifies US conditional negative security assurances to state that: ‘The United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the NPT and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.’
If applied as written, and Pyongyang were to eliminate its nuclear weapons and join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the United States wouldn’t employ nuclear weapons to defend South Korea from a North Korean attack even if chemical weapons, forward-deployed artillery, short-range missiles, and special force units were used.
Another problem is the limited scope of extended nuclear deterrence. Even if one believes that these threats of retaliation have kept the North from invading the South, extended nuclear deterrence has proven considerably less effective at preventing Pyongyang’s horizontal and vertical proliferation activities.
The former category includes the likely transfer of missiles and WMD-related items to Iran, Syria, and Burma—one of the major sources of North Korea’s export revenue. US nuclear deterrence also can’t affect the vertical proliferation taking place within the country itself, with the regime slowly and sometimes intermittently developing its nuclear weapon potential and perfecting its long-range ballistic missiles. In addition, extended nuclear deterrence is ironically most effective at dissuading a government from launching a large-scale war against a covered country, but is much less effective at averting lower-level provocations, which Pyongyang has been conducting for decades.
The United States has used various supplementary tools to address these deterrence gaps. To curb the export of WMD-related material and their means of delivery from North Korea, the George W. Bush administration launched its Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) in 2003. The Obama administration vigorously supported the PSI, including through securing enactment of supporting UN Security Council resolutions.
The difficulty in deterring lower-level attacks—those below the level to which the United States could credibly be expected to respond with nuclear weapons—became newly evident with last year’s incidents. Even when confronting non-nuclear states, the United States has found that threats of nuclear response lack credibility when the stakes don’t warrant nuclear use. For this reason, the 1950s-era ‘Massive Retaliation’ doctrine was replaced by the Flexible Response doctrine in the 1960s, in which the United States would seek to counter revolutionary guerrilla movements with counterinsurgency warfare, massive Soviet tank armies with more sophisticated US conventional capabilities, and so forth. But the United States always declined to accept a no-first-use doctrine since Flexible Response allowed for the employment of US nuclear weapons in some conventional war scenarios, such as to prevent a Soviet tank breakthrough in Western Europe during the Cold War.
Now, though, South Korean military leaders are emphasizing in their declaratory doctrine the need for a prompt and vigorous response to future provocations. In addition, the South Korean military has stationed near the intra-Korean border dozens of US-made surface-to-surface precision-guided Army Tactical Missile Systems capable of hitting Pyongyang. The South Koreans, alone and in cooperation with the US military, have also been engaged in an expanded series of exercises during the past year. Although Chinese and Russian officials have often opposed them as provocative, the North Koreans have normally acted quietly and cautiously whenever the exercises take place.
So, what else could South Korea and the United States do to better deter North Korean aggression? One possibility would be to relax their plans to transfer operational command of joint military action on the Korean Peninsula from US Forces Korea to South Korea’s armed forces. They could also limit the scope of the combat missions that Seoul will take over from the Pentagon in the next few years. While the Americans see the move as upgrading South Korea’s status and underscoring US confidence in Seoul’s improving military capabilities, many South Koreans interpret the transfer as reflecting American eagerness to reduce its Seoul-related commitments and to reallocate US defence resources to higher security priorities.
Also, in theory at least, returning US tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea could further assure its security from northern aggression. (The United States withdrew its small battlefield nuclear weapons from South Korea in late 1991, when the two Koreas were finalizing their ‘joint declaration on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula’.)
The United States clearly has superior nuclear and conventional forces to those of North Korea, but many South Koreans doubt whether the US really would respond to a nuclear attack on Seoul with a retaliatory strike against Pyongyang, especially if the North might respond by attacking US forces in Japan, or even striking the US homeland directly, with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. If the US nukes were already in South Korea, however, the North Korean leadership might be deterred since the weapons would be more visible and could more plausibly be fired, perhaps inadvertently, following an attack.
The North Koreans would be even more credibly deterred if South Korea possessed its own nuclear weapons since the Seoul government and military would be even more inclined to retaliate to a nuclear attack against its population or territory. Some South Koreans have become frustrated about the failure of the Six-Party Talks and other efforts to roll back North Korea’s nuclear programme, and see having their own nuclear weapons as ‘an equalizer’ to allow Seoul to negotiate with Pyongyang about Korean denuclearization from a position of equality and without having to adopt an aggressive conventional pre-emption doctrine against the North.
But regardless of how decision makers in Seoul see it, South Korea’s neighbours wouldn’t welcome a return of US nuclear weapons to the Peninsula—or South Korea’s acquisition of an independent nuclear deterrent. Beijing would be most likely to oppose these developments, since any nuclear weapons that could attack targets in North Korea would most likely be able to devastate targets in China as well.
And there’s one more reason why South Korea would meet opposition to doing so even from its ally the United States—the Obama administration is committed to decreasing the role of nuclear weapons in the world. Supporting the development of nuclear weapons in South Korea hardly seems consistent with this goal.
Photo Credit: US Army
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That nuclear weapons are even still an option on the table is reprehensible.
That the U.S., a country with a nearly all-powerful army (when not mired in pointless wars) would be troubled by the meager nuclear ambitions of a soon to fail dictatorship shows the miserable psychological insecurities that they and the world has over their own neighbors.
South Korea should not develop nuclear weapons. They should seek to infiltrate North Korean society more. More radio broadcasts. More efforts at commerce at a small level – tourism, border markets. Anything to instill a sense of self-determination in the peoples of North Korea. This will bring about change faster than any military deterrence could hope for.
To create a greater sense of threat will only allow the NK propaganda machines to scare and influence their population even more.
Also, while nuclear deterrence is often cited as preventing major conflicts between world superpowers, it really only shifted the wars to proxy wars fought on poorer countries soil.
If I were SK, I would worry more about NK destabilizing and having a flood of millions trying to leave the country. This is a far bigger threat than any military offensive NK has.
Armchair Pundit Hater
You live in a cowardly fantasy world and are incredibly ignorant about the Korean situation and history in general. More importantly, your condescending tone demonstrates your know-it-all arrogance towards your fellow man. Yes, wars seem terrible and pointless, but the fact that they occur is proof that violence is a force of evolution that cannot simply be argued away. Moreover, those wars were started and waged by men smarter than you could ever hope to be. It takes brains to kill millions of people who are trying their best not to be killed. As cynical as it may sound, the political map of the world today is stark testament to the power of violence to define the landscape.
And all of your suggestions of infiltration, radio broadcasts, and what not have been tried and are continuing to be tried, but they have not accomplished anything. Commerce? Are you kidding me? Do you not understand what the Iron Curtain was or how Stalinist regimes operate? Do you believe North Koreans are simply wayward global citizens who just need to "loosen up"? Tell you what, I will buy you a plane ticket to the DMZ so that you can stroll across the border that we insecure Free-Worlders refuse to cross to tell those North Koreans that their government is lying to them and that they just need to open their eyes to the rest of the world. Jeez, why didn't half-a-century's-worth of world citizens think of trying that?
By the way, the ticket will be one way since I don't see the point of bringing your body back home, especially if it's been stripped of its organs.
Kha Nguyen
It’s clear that South Korea and Japan also should develop their own nukes, as their potential foes – North Korea and China – already have. Relying on the US has a price, and South Vietnam is a good example for the South Korean and Japanese to look at.
Cyrus
That is where you are wrong. The United States backed up its word in the conflict with NoKor. It send in troops and lead the UN Forces from turning the tide instead of only having Busan it pushed the NoKor troops up to the boarder with China. If China did not intervene then the Korean Peninsula could have been united now.
Buck O’Fama
It would be nice to see the USA withdraw from the NPT. That way we could sell nukes to S, Korea, Tiawan, Poland, Georgia, Etc.. A Dozen GLCM’s with 400 Kt. warheads would have cause Russia to reconsider their invasion. The ROC having a SLBM or 3 with Mirv’d 200 Kt. warheads would sure give the Chi-Coms pause.
Both sides having nukes is a stand-off. One side having nukes is a prescription for War.
So far the USA acting as the Cops has kept the Wars from starting. Those days are fast drawing to a close. America is running out of will AND money. No other nation is capable of acting as the police. The power vacuum left by Americas withdrawal will be filled by the Nations most willing to use their nukes.
That is why Iran is hard at work on theirs. So if we sell a dozen or so to KSA, that will give the Mad Dog Mullahs (MDM) something to think about. The MDM knows Israel and the USA will not first strike them. Who knows what the KSA will do?
Krypter
China has allowed North Korea to develop nuclear weapons, and so the US should allow South Korea to develop nuclear weapons as well. South Korea is a rich country and shouldn’t rely so heavily on the USA for its security, especially since “rolling back communism” is no longer necessary. What’s necessary is a balance of deterrence in East Asia, and that would be provided most easily by letting South Korea and Japan arm themselves with nuclear weapons. For China and North Korea, the costs of bullying or invading their democratic neighbours would rise astronomically.
ozivan
@Krypter. From another view, the world would be nicely balance by 2 new Asian nuclear powers, Japan & Korea, against UK & France. India vs Pakistan. US vs China. Russia is the wild card !!
mamush daniel
Don’t worry, once the warmonger US politicians push S.K. to the fire you will see what happens next, but before that the S.K. horse like government may remove the US warmongers and homo sexual Christian CIA chickens buddies way from its back and……. then … S.K. + N.K. = 1K = Peace.
yang zi
China should not worry nuclear weapons in South Korean or Japan. The proximity of these countries made sure these weapons are not used, if it ever used against China, it would mean the end of South Korean and Japan.
France and Britten both have nuclear weapons, they are at peace!
However, US is probably wise to discourage South Korean’s nuclear impulse. otherwise it is hard to persuade North Korean giving up its nuclear weapons.
ed hong
Oh my god, a non propaganda and thoughtful response from yang zi! I thought I would never see the day!
Stop the insanity
"However, US is probably wise to discourage South Korean’s nuclear impulse. otherwise it is hard to persuade North Korean giving up its nuclear weapons."
North Korea developed nuclear weapons despite the South's not having them, so your argument is disingenuous. The Chinese are truly mental midgets to think that their race won't be exterminated if they attempt to use a proxy state to wage nuclear war on the United States. This scenario has been war-gamed for decades by the Pentagon and it always leads to Armaggedon. There is no such thing as a limited nuclear war, and any attack by North Korea will be seen as a proxy attack from its enabler, China.