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Park Chung-hee, the CIA and the bomb

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In Brief

A declassified 1978 CIA report related to nuclear proliferation during the Park Chung-hee era shows that, far from making South Korea more secure, Park’s toying with the nuclear option made him an unpredictable and even dangerous client who needed restraint in the eyes of US policy makers.

The ROK’s nuclear ambitions, especially in the post-1975 period, resulted in the US threatening to rupture the security alliance if the ROK did not stop its nuclear intransigence.

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Given the current public debate in Seoul about reintroducing US nuclear weapons or trying again to go it alone, there are lessons to be learned from Park Chung-hee’s failed proliferation strategy in the 1972–1978 period. The CIA’s report is not merely of historical interest. It provides important historical lessons on debates related to how to respond to the North Korean nuclear breakout, and whether South Korea should respond in kind.

First, it shows that even as an authoritarian military dictatorship, it was impossible for South Korea to conduct a clandestine nuclear weapons program without the US quickly realising. Under conditions of democracy and high levels of openness of trade, migration and information, a clandestine program is even less possible today.

Second, as the CIA report shows, Park’s strategy failed in two ways. Not only did South Korea gain little actual nuclear weapons technology; Park’s threats also undermined trust and confidence with American officials who quickly realised that his program was fundamentally inconsistent with American global and regional interests.

Similarly today, South Korea proliferating nuclear weapons would lead to alliance stress and possible rupture with the US, international sanctions, diplomatic setbacks, trade losses, possible follow-on effects on Japan’s non-nuclear commitments, extraordinarily dangerous nuclear threat exchanges with North Korea, and possible targeting of South Korean cities by China and Russia, none of which are presumably what nuclear advocates hope to realise by going nuclear, or threatening to do so. Rather, this rhetoric appears to the international community to be irresponsible posturing and demeaning to South Korea’s dignity as a proud non-nuclear weapons state that will host the Global Nuclear Summit in March 2012. It certainly undermines South Korea’s efforts to renew and amend the US–ROK nuclear cooperation agreement in 2014.

In the mid-seventies, as the CIA pointed out, the US not only had military leverage over the South due to its troop presence and arms sales, but was also the main financier of South Korea’s reactor program. In the same way today, commercial realities are intertwined with strategic concerns because South Korean proliferation would lead to loss of uranium supplies to its nuclear reactors from countries such as Australia and Canada, and from enrichment suppliers such as the US and others in the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Third, the outcome of the military crisis of August 1976, in the midst of an active American debate about withdrawal of troops and nuclear weapons from South Korea, suggests that the massive mobilisation of conventional force is what mattered when push came to shove with the North, not the relatively incredible threat of nuclear attack.

The same lesson applies now that the North has obtained nuclear arms. What matters at the DMZ is the ability of South Korea and the allies, in particular the US, to respond to North Korean military aggression. Whether the retaliation for a North Korean attack is nuclear or conventional from the allies, the North Koreans know that they will lose. Today, the South’s superior conventional forces backed by American forces almost certainly suffice to deter North Korean attack, whether nuclear or conventional.

A related lesson is one on the state of the US–ROK alliance. An important factor in Park backing off his proliferation program was the creation of the ROK–US Combined Forces Command in 1978, of which the commander had both wartime and peacetime operational control over South Korean forces. Such an arrangement ensured that the US military would become automatically involved in a war in Korea at the outset. The tripwire mechanism was a reassuring fact for Park. Institutional integration and relationships matter in the alliance, and nuclear weapons tend to create stress rather than alliance convergence. This is as true today as it was when the CIA wrote its report.

Fourth, the CIA report concludes that unilateral withdrawal could lead to the resumption of South Korea’s nuclear weapons program. In fact, the withdrawal at the time was reversed, and the eventual unilateral withdrawal in 1991–92 that left US conventional forces in place and augmented them with increasing lethal non-nuclear technologies, did not lead to war, nor to South Korean proliferation. Indeed, it arguably prepared the way for engagement of the North in a way that slowed their proliferation by a decade, and led to its utter isolation in its current nuclear-armed posture.

South Korean proliferation today would make it far more difficult to negotiate the denuclearisation of North Korea — already a task that will likely take many years to achieve. An inter-Korean nuclear arms race arising from South Korean nuclear armament could be permanent, if it did not end in a nuclear war first. It would be an unstable relationship tending always toward mutual probable destruction. Nothing could justify the North’s program more than a South Korean breakout, and it would almost certainly lead to a new Cold War in the region not only with the North, but with China, thereby increasing South Korean and Japanese insecurity.

The continuing perception of nuclear threat by the North when nuclear weapons have been removed from the Peninsula and the region for nearly two decades indicates the depth of North Korean distrust and fear of the US and the degree to which American statements of intent are taken seriously in the North. This fact suggests that the mere threat of nuclear retaliation by the US, even with its weapons recessed a great distance from the Peninsula, suffices for purposes of communicating American intention to the North Koreans.

Finally, the CIA’s report shows that the threat of nuclear proliferation and nuclear war in Korea has deep roots, and cannot be overcome unilaterally on either side. Great powers have restrained both Koreas at different times, the US blocking the South during the seventies, the former Soviet Union inducing the North to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in the eighties, and China, the US and Russia all slowing the North’s breakout from 1991 until today. To us, it is remarkable that during periods of inter-Korean and US–DPRK improved relations, dialogue and engagement have led to progress in the attempts to stop the North from gaining more nuclear weapons capacities.

The opposite is also true — the North accelerated its proliferation activity during the height of the Cold War when Reagan confronted the former Soviet Union in this region, and again, when President George W. Bush downgraded and degraded relations with Pyongyang. The lesson for politicians and strategists today is obvious.

Peter Hayes is Professor of International Relations, Global Studies School, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Director, Nautilus Institute in San Francisco and of Nautilus at RMIT.

Chung-in Moon is Professor at the Department of Political Science, Yonsei University.

Longer versions of this article first appeared in Global Asia here and at the Nautilus Institute here.

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