By Zachary Keck
The conventional military balance on the Korean Peninsula best explains North and South Korea’s nuclear trajectories.
For those interested in why some states seek nuclear weapons while others foreswear them, the Korean Peninsula presents an interesting case study. Both South Korea and North Korea have sought nuclear weapons; however, Seoul would abandon its nuclear pursuit while Pyongyang continues on a nuclear trajectory.
Why did they take such different nuclear paths? I would argue that this is best explained by the shifting conventional military balance on the Korean Peninsula between the 1960s and today.
Despite some earlier very basic atomic research activities, North Korea’s nuclear program didn’t start making much progress until the late 1970s, when it expanded its atomic cooperation with the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, it was during the 1980s and early 1990s when North Korea made the bulk of its indigenous nuclear progress. Indeed, by the time the first North Korean nuclear crisis ended in 1994, many believed that Pyongyang had enough reprocessed plutonium for a couple of nuclear devices.
What changed in the 1980s and 1990s to spur such sudden and rapid progress on North Korea’s nuclear program? One certainly cannot argue that the nuclear threats that North Korea faced expanded during this time. By the 1980s, the U.S. had been reducing the number of nuclear warheads it keep in South Korea for decades, and in 1991 it removed them all from the Korean peninsula. Moreover, South Korea had seriously explored a nuclear weapons program during the late 1960s and the 1970s. By the early 1980s, however, it had largely abandoned this course.
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