Living next door to a nuclear threat: Seoul’s grim reality

As the United States debates the wisdom of military action against North Korea, its allies in South Korea have largely moved on and reached an uncomfortable conclusion — that they may have no choice but to live with a nuclear-armed neighbour.

US and South Korean forces began twice-yearly war games on Monday aimed at preparing for a possible attack by the North. But the idea of trying to knock out the North’s nuclear arsenal with a pre-emptive strike is a non-starter across the political spectrum in South Korea, where millions live in range of North Korean artillery and rockets.

“In South Korea, whether you are a conservative or progressive, military action is not an option you can choose,” said Mr Koh Yu-hwan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul, the capital. “It’s an option of mass destruction.”

That broad consensus was behind President Moon Jae-in’s assurances to South Korea last week, saying that he was firmly against a military strike on the North and that the Trump administration would seek the South’s consent before any such action.

On Monday, Mr Moon emphasised that the joint exercises this week were defensive in nature.

But if South Korea’s leaders have essentially ruled out the “preventive war” that the Trump administration says it is considering, they are still grappling with what options that leaves them.

Mr Moon contends that North Korea can be persuaded to forsake nuclear weapons through a combination of deft diplomacy and tough economic sanctions. Yet many across South Korea find that prospect highly unlikely.

Ask people in the South whether the North will ever abandon its arsenal, and more often than not, the answer is: Would you if you were North Korean?

Still, South Korean politicians cannot openly agree with those like Ms Susan E Rice, a national security adviser to President Barack Obama, who recently argued that the world could tolerate and contain North Korea in the same way it did the nuclear threats from the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War.

They cannot do so not because they do not believe that — many do — but because it would be politically difficult to accept the North’s nuclear arsenal without putting South Korea on equal footing with its own nuclear weapons.

“Even if the North has effectively become a nuclear power, acknowledging it as one without South Korea itself going nuclear is politically untenable,” said Mr Paik Hak-soon, a senior analyst at the Sejong Institute, a think- tank south of Seoul. At the same time, South Korean leaders are unwilling to accept the view of Ms Rice’s successor, Lieutenant-General H R McMaster, who has maintained that “classical deterrence theory” cannot be applied to the North’s leader, Mr Kim Jong-un, given his unpredictable nature and brutal record. Some South Korean analysts fear that such thinking would all but justify starting a war.

It has not been lost on South Korea that Washington seemed to recognise the urgency of North Korea’s nuclear threat only after it demonstrated an ability to hit the US with intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) last month — and not after earlier intelligence assessments concluded that the North could mount a nuclear warhead on a short-range missile capable of hitting the South.

To South Koreans, the idea that North Korea would fire a nuclear-armed ICBM at the US without being attacked is absurd. They argue that Mr Kim knows the US would retaliate by destroying the North and that they do not regard him as suicidal.

Instead, the fear in South Korea is that the North will try to use its nuclear arsenal to drive a wedge between the US and its allies in the region.

In some ways, it is already doing so.

The more President Donald Trump and his advisers speak of attacking North Korea in a “preventive war”, the more South Koreans worry that the US is putting its security ahead of their own. A recent interview in which Senator Lindsey Graham said that Mr Trump believed that “if thousands die, they’re going to die over there, they’re not going to die here” has exacerbated such suspicions and generated widespread outrage.

At the same time, a common question among South Koreans these days is whether the US will hesitate to come to their aid after the North demonstrates it can deliver nuclear warheads to US cities.

In recent years, the US has repeatedly sent nuclear-capable strategic bombers over South Korea to signal that its “nuclear umbrella” extends over the nation. But some local newspapers have dismissed the flights, likening them to “police patrol cars that pass through the neighbourhood but never catch the thief”.

Mr Kim Sung-han, a former vice-foreign minister who is a professor at Korea University in Seoul, said the US and South Korea must discuss new ways to assure the public of the US’ commitment to protect it.

With public confidence in the US slipping, recent polls show a majority in South Korea favour arming the country with nuclear weapons of its own. And last week, the main conservative opposition group, the Liberty Korea Party, formally called on Washington to reintroduce tactical nuclear weapons that were withdrawn from South Korea in the early 1990s.

The proposal, though popular, presents the South Korean government with another dilemma: Officials said the presence of nuclear arms in the country would make it far more difficult to persuade the North to give up its own.

Confusion over the Trump administration’s strategy has only contributed to anxiety in South Korea.

In the past two decades, Washington has repeatedly tightened sanctions against North Korea. But “the more they isolated and pressured the North,” said Mr Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, “the more advanced its nuclear programme has become”.

Mr Moon has urged a more flexible approach, suggesting that Washington’s past insistence that North Korea commit to nuclear disarmament as a precondition for talks to begin may no longer be realistic. Instead, he has argued that the priority should be a freeze of the North’s nuclear and missile programmes, though he has not been specific about how to achieve that.

Mr Koh, the Dongguk University professor, said the government’s best hope might be to transform North Korea in the long term “like in the old Soviet Union” by encouraging economic liberalisation and promoting the flow of information into the isolated nation, including South Korean movies and television dramas.

But others analysts warn that may be more wishful thinking. Unlike China and Russia, they note, North Korea shares a peninsula with a neighbour with which its people will always draw direct comparisons. As long as the South remains the more successful Korean state — its economy is now more than 20 times bigger — the autocratic government in the North will consider it an existential threat, they argue. THE NEW YORK TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Choe Sang-Hun is The New York Times’s Korea correspondent.