CHEORWON, South Korea (AP) — Amid the constant crackle of machine guns and exploding clouds of smoke, amphibious tanks carve a lake not far from the great green mountains along the world’s most heavily armed border.
Dozens of South Korean and U.S. combat engineers are building a pontoon bridge to carry tanks and armored vehicles across the water, all within range of North Korean artillery.
For seven decades, the allies have held annual exercises like this latest one to deter aggression from North Korea, whose surprise invasion of South Korea in 1950 sparked a war that is technically not over.
The alliance with the United States has allowed South Korea to build a powerful democracy whose citizens trust that Washington would protect them if Pyongyang ever realized its dream of unifying the Korean peninsula under its own rule.
Until now.
With dozens of nuclear weapons in North Korea’s burgeoning arsenal, repeated threats to fire them at its enemies and a series of tests of powerful missiles designed to target a U.S. city with a nuclear strike, more and more South Koreans are losing faith in America, vowed , to support his long-time ally.
The fear is this: That a U.S. president would hesitate to use nuclear weapons to protect the South from a North Korean attack, knowing full well that Pyongyang could kill millions of Americans in a retaliatory nuclear strike.
Frequent polls show that a strong majority of South Koreans – between 70% and 80% in some polls – support their country’s acquisition of nuclear weapons or push Washington to bring back the tactical nuclear weapons it withdrew from the South in the early 1990s.
It reflects a surprising loss of trust between nations that like to describe their alliance as a steadfast cornerstone of America’s military presence in the region.
“I think one day they can abandon us and go their own way if it better serves their national interests,” Kim Bang-rak, a 76-year-old security official in Seoul, said of the United States. “If North Korea bombs us, we should bomb them in retaliation, so it would be better for us to have nuclear weapons.”
These fears are reinforced: just hours before U.S.-South Korean tank drills began in Cheorwon, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un oversaw two test launches of ballistic missiles designed to simulate “scorched earth” nuclear attacks on South Korean command centers and airfields.
At the heart of South Korea’s unrest is a broader debate over who should be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, an issue that has troubled nations since two U.S. atomic bombs leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The sharp rise in support for South Korean nuclear weapons is not occurring in a vacuum. Nonproliferation experts say there is little sign of a slowdown in the vibrant global nuclear arms race.
According to a recent report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, nine countries – the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel – spent nearly $83 billion on nuclear weapons in 2022. That’s an increase of $2.5 billion from 2021, with the United States alone spending $43.7 billion.
The way South Korea handles the nuclear issue could have significant implications for Asia’s future, potentially jeopardizing the U.S.-South Korea alliance and endangering a delicate nuclear balance that has so far ensured an uneasy peace in a dangerous region.
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Iron armored. This is how the United States has long described its commitment to South Korea in the event of an outbreak of war. U.S. officials firmly believe that any attack on Seoul by the 1.2 million-strong North Korean military would provoke an overwhelming response.
The United States is contractually obligated to defend Seoul and Tokyo and has 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea and another 56,000 in Japan. Tens of thousands of Americans live in the greater Seoul area, a sprawling area of 24 million people about an hour’s drive from the inter-Korean border.
“The ironclad commitment is not just words; it is a reality. We have thousands of troops there,” Gen. Mark Milley, the top U.S. military officer at the time, recently told reporters in Tokyo. An attack, said Milley, now retired, “would mean the end of North Korea.”
When asked about the South Korean public’s support for building its own nuclear force, Milley said: “The United States would favor nuclear nonproliferation. We naturally think they are inherently dangerous. And we have expanded our nuclear umbrella to include both Japan and South Korea.”
South Korean Defense Minister Shin Wonsik recently said he and his U.S. counterpart had signed a document in which Washington agreed to mobilize its full range of military capabilities, including nuclear weapons, to protect the South from a North Korean nuclear attack.
However, many in Seoul would prefer to have their own nuclear weapons.
North Korea’s only advantage over the South’s high-tech military is nuclear bombs, Kim Taeil, a recent college graduate, said in an interview.
“So if South Korea gets nuclear weapons, we will secure an advantageous position where North Korea cannot compete with us.”
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Although the idea that South Korea could develop its own nuclear weapons has been around for decades, it has received little public mention from senior government officials. That changed in January, when conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol said his country could “acquire our own nuclear weapons if the situation worsens.”
“It wouldn’t take long,” he said, while also mentioning the possibility of demanding that the United States reintroduce nuclear weapons to South Korea.
At an April summit in Washington, Yoon and President Joe Biden took steps to address such South Korean concerns. The result was the Washington Declaration, in which Seoul committed to remaining in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapon state and the United States said it would increase nuclear planning consultations with its ally. They also announced that they would send more nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula as a show of force.
Not long after the meeting, the USS Kentucky became the first nuclear-armed U.S. submarine to visit South Korea since the 1980s.
Opponents of South Korea’s nuclear weapons acquisition said they hoped the statement would calm a nervous public.
“No one can say with 100 percent certainty” whether a U.S. president would order nuclear strikes to defend Seoul if it meant the destruction of an American city, Wi Sung-lac, a former South Korean nuclear envoy, said in an interview at the Seoul office.
That’s why the broader consultations among allies called for in the Washington Declaration are needed to “manage the situation so that we can mitigate public anger and frustration,” he said.
Part of the concern in Seoul can be traced to Donald Trump’s presidency – and his possible re-election in 2024.
As president, Trump repeatedly pointed out that the alliance was by no means “ironclad” but of a transactional nature. As he sought closer ties with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump demanded South Korea pay billions more to keep American troops on its soil and questioned the need for what he called U.S. military exercises with South Korea “very provocative” and “enormously expensive.”
“No matter how strong President Biden’s security commitment is now, if someone committed to isolationism and America First policies becomes the next US president, Biden’s current commitment may become a mere scrap of paper overnight,” said Cheong Seong-Chang, an analyst at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea, said in an interview.
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South Korean support for nuclear bombs can also be linked to North Korea’s extraordinary weapons advances and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In 2017, North Korea tested for the first time an intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the US mainland. While the North is still working to overcome technological hurdles with its ICBMs, the weapons have fundamentally changed the region’s security calculus.
North Korea, one of the world’s poorest countries, may currently have an arsenal of 60 nuclear weapons and has said it is deploying “tactical” missiles along the Korean border, signaling its intention to arm them with lower-yield nuclear weapons.
While the Koreas have avoided major conflict since the end of the Korean War in 1953, deadly skirmishes and attacks in recent years have killed dozens of people.
If violence escalates in the future, some observers believe North Korea, inferior to the firepower of the United States and South Korea and fearing for the safety of its leadership, could resort to the use of a tactical nuclear bomb.
“There is probably no longer a purely conventional scenario in Korea,” says Robert Kelly, a political science professor at Pusan National University in the south. “North Korea would quickly lose a conventional conflict. Pyongyang knows this, which dramatically increases the likelihood that it will initially use nuclear weapons, at least tactically.”
Russia’s war against Ukraine could also show South Koreans that even friendly nations might be hesitant to give full aid to a country fighting a nuclear-armed enemy. Kim’s visit to Russia earlier this year, where he met President Vladimir Putin and toured weapons facilities, has raised fears that North Korea could obtain technology that would boost its nuclear program.
“We absolutely need nuclear weapons. “Basically, peace can only be maintained if we have the same power as (our enemies),” said Kim Joung-hyun, a 46-year-old office worker in Seoul. “If you look at the Russo-Ukrainian war, Ukraine cannot deal with the Russian invasion on its own unless it begs other countries for weapons.”
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Opponents of South Korea’s nuclear armament point out that strong public support for nuclear weapons likely does not take into account the high cost or damage to relations with ally Washington and to vital trade with neighbor China. Seoul’s switch to nuclear power could lead to sanctions against South Korea’s export-dependent economy.
There are also fears it could encourage sometimes-rival Tokyo to consider developing its own nuclear weapons program.
Some are pushing for a less drastic solution to South Korea’s unique security concerns.
“We have no choice but to invite American tactical nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula,” Cheon Seong-whun, a former presidential adviser to a previous conservative government, said in an interview. This, he said, would allow South Korea to use those weapons if North Korea uses its tactical nuclear weapons, but would not harm the alliance with Washington.
John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, has written that placing U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea would also “buy valuable time for Seoul and Washington to fully assess the impact of South Korea becoming a nuclear weapons state.”
According to Richard Lawless, a former senior U.S. State Department and Central Intelligence Agency official who studies nuclear proliferation in Asia, the Washington statement and subsequent high-level meetings between the allies reassured many in Seoul.
“The genie of the (South Korean) nuclear option is not back in the bottle yet, but it is being successfully contained,” he told The Associated Press by email.
Still, Lawless said, “there remains a deep belief among some senior politicians and many in the population” that the only real way to deter nuclear-armed North Korea is for South Korea to have its own nuclear weapons capabilities. “That concern is largely under the waves now, but it remains and would be raised with some passion.”
However the debate ends, many in Seoul share another strong belief on all sides of the issue.
“There is 100 percent certainty that the threat from North Korea will increase,” said Cheon, the former presidential adviser. “North Korea will definitely not remain silent.”
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AP journalist Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.
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Foster Klug is AP news director for Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific and has covered nuclear issues on the Korean Peninsula and Asia since 2005.
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