Lunch with Song Min-Soon

South Korea is talking about building its own nuclear weapons. The man who published the opinion piece raising this idea is a Mr. Song. I had lunch with Song Min-Soon in Washington some years ago. I was surprised to get his invitation, unsure which of the things I’d written had attracted the attention of this career South Korean diplomat. Mr. Song had been Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade and had served as the lead negotiator for South Korea in the Six Party talks that tried to find a way to discourage North Korea from building nuclear weapons.

Mr. Song was friendly but blunt. I remember him saying that the North Koreans were much better negotiators than U.S. negotiators. He put a good deal of emphasis on this point, mentioning several ways in which the North had outsmarted the United States. Somehow the topic came up of my going to North Korea to present some of the arguments about nuclear weapons that are in Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons (particularly that they didn’t coerce Japan to surrender, as I recall). I can’t recall now exactly how this idea came into the conversation. This was before the North’s nuclear weapons program became obvious and before the 2017 crisis in relations during which President Trump and Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un traded threats with the president talking about “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” It seems like such a naive idea in retrospect to try to talk the North out of building nuclear weapons based on their lack of military utility that perhaps we can just assume that I suggested it. I remember him saying after some back and forth, “You are not yet ready to talk to the North Koreans.” And then, maybe in a fatherly way, or maybe in a condescending way (or maybe both), “Perhaps in five years.”

Mr. Song is back in the news this week because he wrote an opinion piece Monday in JoongAng Ilbo suggesting that one way the South Koreans could reduce the cost of having American troops stationed in South Korea would be to build their own nuclear weapons arsenal. Mr. Song is an experienced politician and diplomat and I assume that his suggestion was thought through and the likely impact on North Korea, Japan, and the United States carefully calculated.

It seems certain that the North Koreans are bent on building nuclear weapons. President Trump’s nominee to be deputy secretary of state told a Senate confirmation hearing that the United States sees no “meaningful or verifiable” evidence that the North intends to scale back it’s nuclear weapons program. South Korea could build a nuclear arsenal rather quickly. They have nuclear power plants and had a nascent program to build nuclear weapons in the 1970s (which the United States pressured them to abandon). Some experts argue that South Korea could build it’s own nuclear weapons in as little as three years. So is South Korea truly interested in building nuclear weapons? I doubt it. Militarily, nuclear weapons are not an attractive option for geographically small countries like Israel or South Korea. (South Korea is smaller in area than North Korea, Iceland, or Guatamala.) The chief problem with nuclear weapons—as weapons—is that because the explosions they create are so large and because those explosions spread deadly radioactive fallout downwind, they tend to kill large numbers of civilians, even when the civilians are not directly targeted.

There is a well-known study by physicists Frank von Hippel and Sydney Drell of a hypothetical “surgical” strike by Soviet Union nuclear forces on U. S. nuclear weapons bases in the early 1970s. The attack is carefully limited to military targets: missile silos, air bases, and submarine bases. But because nuclear weapons are such clumsy weapons, it is almost impossible to prevent civilian casualties. The result of this hypothetical scenario? Twenty million American civilians die, mostly as a result of radioactive fallout spreading far downwind. The use of nuclear weapons in a geographically small country would be far more devastating than using them in a larger country, like the United States, Russia, or China.

South Korea is not only a relatively small country, most of its population is concentrated in cities. This makes South Korea especially vulnerable to nuclear weapons. So it is in South Korea’s interest to avoid a nuclear war in Korea at all costs. In my judgement, the South Koreans are not serious about wanting to build nuclear weapons as potential weapons of war.

However, all these same objections apply to North Korea, and they are busily building a nuclear weapons arsenal. If nuclear weapons make so little military sense, why build them? One word: prestige. Nuclear weapons are seen worldwide as the mark of a technologically advanced nation and a world power. They are also seen as a guarantee of survival. I’m not arguing that these things are true, I’m just saying that is how these weapons are perceived. Perhaps South Korea could build a nuclear arsenal for these reasons.

But it seems much more likely that South Korea is simply threatening to build an arsenal as a response to a recent demand by the Trump administration that South Korea contribute more to the cost of keeping U.S. troops in South Korea. “U.S. President Donald Trump, whose view of allies as freeloaders is well known, is now reportedly pushing for an unprecedented fivefold increase in South Korea’s contribution, . . .” President Trump’s determination to pull back from the treaty with Iran could easily lead to the nuclearization of Iran, and here also in South Korea, his attempts to get a better deal could lead to the building of nuclear force in South Korea. It goes without saying that every increase in the number of nuclear-armed states increases the chances for human error and nuclear war.

What this news points out is not the extent to which nuclear weapons are fearsome, must-have weapons. What it points out is that they make excellent political leverage. Nuclear weapons, more than anything, have become bargaining chips. Having watched the North use nuclear weapons to gain food, oil, concessions, attention, and eventually a series of high-profile one on one summits between President Trump and Supreme Leader Kim, is it surprising that South Koreans are tempted to acquire the same leverage with the United States that the North has? Why not play the nuclear card, too?