Koreans Are Trying to Tell Us Something About the Concept of Nuclear Deterrence

“U.S. nuclear weapons in South Korea could become an emotional issue between the two countries. The ingredients of U.S. secretive-ness and anti-nuclear sentiment have inflamed the issue . . . . The Soviet Union undoubtedly will try to exploit this issue in the future, as it already has in the South Pacific and the Philippines.”

So warned a Korean participant in the recent fourth annual conference of the Council on U.S.-Korean Security Studies here.

The alleged basing of nuclear weapons on Korean soil (the U.S. government has always refused either to confirm or to deny the presence of nuclear weapons in Korea) and the question of how and when such weapons might be used were highlighted as among the major irritants eroding South Korean public support for the U.S.-Korean mutual defense treaty.

Ironically, Korea is one of the few places in the world where a convincing argument can be made that nuclear weapons have been an instrument of peace. “The standard explanation for the Communist capitulation to the terms of the Korean armistice agreement in July, 1953,” a 1985 Cornell University study notes, “is that the Chinese and North Koreans were intimidated by President Eisenhower’s threatened use of atomic weapons.” And for many years a convincing argument could be made as well that it was this U.S. nuclear capability that continued to deter the North Koreans from taking advantage of their conventional-force superiority, a superiority that they still enjoy, and launching a cross-border invasion to once again attempt the conquest of the Republic of Korea.

What has changed is not so much the arguments as the context in which the arguments are made. A new generation has come of age that does not share the perceptions of its predecessors. For example, in 1953, when the U.S-South Korean mutual defense treaty was signed, nuclear weapons were viewed merely as “additional firepower of large magnitude”--firepower that President Eisenhower and President Truman before him were quite willing to use if the circumstances so required.

Today a “nuclear threshold” has developed that places nuclear weapons in an entirely different category from that of conventional weapons. Breaching that threshold short of an immediate and unequivocal threat to national survival is not very likely--a fact that our enemies know full well.

At the conference here in Honolulu, retired South Korean Maj. Gen. Park Nam-Pyo gave a short talk on the effect of war on his immediate family. As a result of World War II and then the Korean War, he had close relatives scattered from Turkestan in Central Asia to the Soviet Maritimes to northern China and Manchuria to both halves of a divided Korea. While Park had fought for South Korea, other relatives had fought for North Korea. For him and many other South Koreans, nuking North Korea would not mean just nuking your enemy; it would mean nuking your own brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles as well. And such a scenario is intolerable.

But no one at the conference, and few back home in Korea, advocates the abrogation of American nuclear guarantees. Everyone still wants to be protected by the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Like more and more of America’s allies around the world, however, they just don’t want the means of that protection based on their soil.

Such self-serving ambiguity drew some of the harshest criticism of the conference, especially from American former senior military commanders in Korea who accused their Korean counterparts of failing to appreciate the critical role that the threat of nuclear retaliation has played in maintaining the peace on the Korean peninsula for more than a generation. They may be right on the importance of nuclear weapons. But the very surfacing of the nuclear debate at this conference is evidence that even among our friends the concept of nuclear deterrence has become questionable. And if that is so, it would be better to address the issue now before emotions and the anti-nuclear zealots make rational discussion impossible.