South Korea: We may go nuclear as well

South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol suggested in a press conference last week that South Korea might develop its own nuclear weapon. There has been a rolling debate in South Korea for about a year on its potential nuclearization.

But that has been mostly limited to extra-governmental voices in think-tanks and academia.

So it is genuinely surprising that this has already reached the presidential office.

Indeed, it speaks to just how threatening North Korea’s nuclear weapons are perceived in South Korea – and how unhelpful China has been in restraining Pyongyang – that no less than its president is now discussing this.

[It’s also another bad outcome of a lack of enforcement of non-proliferation treaties, and the failure of disincentives to comply. North Korea has been openly developing nuclear weapons for decades, and that means that neighboring nations will have to expand proliferation as a deterrent. Japan and South Korea will go nuclear apart from their inclusion in the US nuclear-defense umbrella, and those weapons might end up in the hands of hostile governments in Seoul and Tokyo in the future. It’s Pandora’s Box all over again. Plus, it didn’t help that the US decapitated the one regime that actually cooperated in denuclearization (Syria), and then failed to robustly defend the other based on the treaty obligations agreed for denuclearization (Ukraine). — Ed]