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WILL the United States continue to unfurl its nuclear umbrella for the benefit of South Korea in the evolving context of North Korea's recent nuclear test? Does Washington's commitment to provide a nuclear umbrella for Seoul need to be redefined?
On October 20, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and South Korean Minister of National Defence Yoon Kwang Ung presided over a bilateral "security consultative meeting" in Washington. Their joint communique was quite bland. Rumsfeld offered "assurances of firm U.S. commitment and immediate support to South Korea, including continuation of the extended deterrence promised by the U.S. nuclear umbrella, consistent with the Mutual Defence Treaty".
There was no ambiguity, therefore, about Washington's willingness to extend the nuclear umbrella to Seoul in the changed circumstances. The umbrella metaphor is shorthand for Washington's readiness to protect South Korea in two situations - the threat of a nuclear strike and an actual attack involving the use of atomic weapons by its "enemy".
In the case of a threat against South Korea, now considered to be somewhat "real", the U.S. is expected to project its own nuclear deterrence as the relevant security guarantee. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), which tested the atom bomb on October 9, is South Korea's ethnic neighbour. Pyongyang's nuclear weapon is portrayed by Seoul and Washington as an imminent threat to South Korea.
The DPRK itself reinforced this impression after the October 20 U.S.-South Korea consultations. Pyongyang said on October 25 that it saw Seoul's acceptance of Resolution 1718, which the United Nations Security Council adopted unanimously on October 14, as "a declaration of confrontation". Resolution 1718 imposed on the DPRK several arms-related and financial sanctions as penalties for its nuclear test. Pyongyang denounced the resolution as a "declaration of war". Although this was directed against the larger international community, on whose behalf the Security Council acted, it seems that the main target was Washington.
Pyongyang has now put South Korea on notice for cosying up to the U.S. following the "historic" event on October 9; it sees a reinvigorated U.S. ally as a direct threat to its security. The U.S., of course, has remained the DPRK's chief adversary since the Korean War of 1950-53.
However, the view from Seoul is nuanced and complex. At a cultural level there seems hardly any deep-seated feelings of implacable hostility towards the DPRK, except among some old conservatives for whom the Korean War was a defining event. This explains why, despite the political frustrations of the U.S. in dealing with the DPRK, South Korea remained, by October-end, tuned to a unique diplomatic wavelength, regardless of the varying impact of Pyongyang's nuclear test on other neighbours such as China and Japan.
At another level, though, South Korea is unable to shrug off its U.S.-oriented historical baggage of the 1950s. Seoul, which finds itself caught in a geopolitical trap, does not want to give up Washington's security guarantees. It is widely reckoned in Seoul that the DPRK's nuclear-weapons and missile-development programmes are largely aimed against the U.S. troops and war machines located on South Korean territory.
At the same time, South Korean troops and citizens are also seen to be within the range of the DPRK's very significant firepower, even if they are merely collateral targets.
South Korea first needs to sort out its identity politics and the issue of reunification with the DPRK without neutralising its existing strategic alliance with the U.S. While this alliance gained renewed traction because of American activism and DPRK rhetoric after the October 9 nuclear test, South Korea is biding its time to "implement" the Security Council sanctions. Seoul has not reversed its "sunshine policy" of engagement with Pyongyang, nor has it abandoned the economically vibrant tourism-promotion project and industrial park in the impoverished DPRK.
The U.S. has objected to the continuation of these projects as a violation of Resolution 1718. It was in this medley of geopolitical trends, economic realities and ethnic resonances that South Korea began bargaining with the U.S. for a clearly defined nuclear umbrella in the changed circumstances.
Since 1978, the U.S. has promised during numerous annual security consultations that it would unfurl its nuclear umbrella. In the early 1990s, at the height of East-West detente, the U.S. withdrew several hundred tactical nuclear weapons that had earlier been deployed on South Korean territory. This coincided with an inter-Korean accord on the principle of denuclearising the entire peninsula. The DPRK has often accused the U.S. of hiding nuclear weapons in South Korea. But these accusations have not gained much international attention, and the U.S. rarely publicises the operational dynamics of its nuclear umbrellas for South Korea, Japan and non-sovereign Taiwan in East Asia.
Seoul has now insisted on being consulted to determine the operational modalities that would activate the U.S. nuclear umbrella in a potential crisis on the Korean peninsula. However, the U.S. had other ideas, and this was reflected in some differences between Rumsfeld and his South Korean counterpart at the October 20 media conference at the Pentagon. In the event, their latest joint communique provides for "extended deterrence" in respect of the U.S. nuclear umbrella.
Seoul will probably see this as another leaf out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation book. The strategic bottom line, though, is that the new U.S.-South Korea formula goes beyond last year's version of "the continued provision of a nuclear umbrella".
This raises the question as to whether the U.S., which intervened in the past to prevent South Korea from experimenting with its own nuclear-weapons programme of sorts, will now opt for a "multilateral force" of atomic arsenals for Seoul and Tokyo. Anti-proliferation specialists such as Scott Sagan have argued that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) deflected the U.S. from such a "multilateral force" to help European allies at the height of the now bygone Cold War.
It is against this background that the U.S. is now understood to have asked South Korea to stay the course stipulated in the inter-Korean accord on denuclearisation despite the DPRK's test and to remain firmly committed to the NPT.
Diplomatic sources say that such interactions on the inside track of the U.S-South Korea dialogue reveal the heightened complexities of non-proliferation in East Asia.
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