The United States and South Korea should seriously consider having Seoul develop nuclear weapons and jointly manage the arsenal if the security situation on the Korean Peninsula continues to worsen, a senior South Korean expert claimed Tuesday.
Cheong Seong-chang, senior research fellow at the state-run South Korean think tank Sejong Institute, made the case during a seminar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, calling for immediate negotiations to resolve North Korean nuclear and missile threats.
"Unless these negotiations take place and if North Korea's nuclear and missile capabilities become further sophisticated, calls in South Korea for nuclear armament cannot help but rise," Cheong said, adding that polls already show a majority of South Koreans are in support of nuclear armament.
Should the security situation on the peninsula worsen further, and if Donald Trump is elected president, the two countries should seriously study an option in which South Korea develops nuclear weapons and the weapons are jointly managed by the South and the U.S.
Nuclear weapons in South Korea would pose direct threats to the North and make Pyongyang's nuclear and missile threats meaningless, thus making the U.S. safer, Cheong said. Concerns about proliferation could be put down as the U.S. would be involved in taking care of the arsenal, he said.
Nuclear weapons would also give Seoul an upper hand in inter-Korean negotiations with Pyongyang, he said.
The North's fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch the following month have rekindled calls in South Korea for nuclear armament, with some leading members of South Korea's ruling party arguing that it makes no sense to rely on the U.S. "nuclear umbrella" as the North's nuclear arsenal grows.
But the government has rejected the idea as running counter to the principle of a nuclear-free peninsula.
Fueling the debate was the suggestion from U.S. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump that South Korea and Japan could be allowed to develop their own nuclear weapons for self-defense to reduce the U.S.' burdens in protecting the allies.
U.S. government officials have also repeatedly reassured Seoul that it doesn't need nuclear weapons.
Moon Chung-in, a professor at Seoul's Yonsei University, rejected the calls for nuclear armament, saying the South should believed in the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Nuclear armament would be a "curse" not a "blessing" for Seoul, he said. (Yonhap)