The superpower could reduce or cancel its military aid program for the South Korean forces’ modernization program, withdraw the remaining U.S. ground troops stationed in South Korea, or even rescind its pledge of providing a nuclear umbrella for the South Korean people.
On December 16, 1975, Vice Minister Yi Ch’ang-sôk of the Ministry of Science and Technology and Director Yun Yong-gu of KAERI visited Ambassador Sneider under instructions from Prime Minister Kim Chong-p’il.
The two South Korean officials asked Sneider what concessions the United States was willing to make in return for the cancellation of the nuclear reprocessing deal with France. A U.S. embassy telegram to the State Department reported that Vice Minister Yi Ch’ang-sôk raised a series of questions:
(A) Would USG [the United States Government] be willing to provide technology and capital assistance to [South Korea’s] commercial fuel fabrication project?; (B) [w]hen and where would [the U.S.-proposed] Asian regional nuclear fuel reprocessing center be established, what would it do, who would participate, what would be [the] ROK role, and would [the United States]
train [South] Korean technicians in advance?; (C) [w]ould USG give support and training for [South Korea’s] long-range nuclear power development program in design and manufacturing capability, reactor safety, [and] waste management technology, and would USG allow employment by South Korea of American experts required for these projects?; (D) [w]ill USG guarantee enrichment services to meet all future [South] Korean requirements and reprocessing services before commercial operation of [the U.S.-proposed] multinational regional reprocessing center?; and (E) [w]ill USG assist ROK with loans for purchase of U.S. natural uranium and nuclear power reactors?45
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Pointing out that the issues raised by Yi Ch’ang-sôk were not only technical but also political, Sneider responded that the real question was whether South Korea was prepared to jeopardize its vital partnership with the United States not only in nuclear and scientific areas but also in broader political and security areas.46 Sneider could not be certain of the South Korean intentions at the meeting with Yi Ch’ang-sôk and Yun Yong-gu. Only when he met with chief of staff Kim Chông-ryôm to hear the same South Korean concerns was he assured of the South Korean intention not to take any further action on the purchase of the French reprocessing plant until the United States formally replied to the South Korean questions.
On January 5, 1976, Sneider sent a telegram to secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger for his immediate attention. Without spelling out what the State Department had previously instructed him, Sneider requested that it reconsider and modify its instructions because the “potential gains [were]
not commensurate with risks involved and potential disruption to [the United States’] basic relationship [with South Korea]. Nor [were the] tactics [proposed previously] consistent with [the United States’] longer-term interests in [South] Korea.” Sneider wrote that he was “convinced [that the U.S.] objective of discouraging nuclear proliferation by blocking [the construction of a] reprocessing facility in [South] Korea [could] be achieved without forcing confrontation and humiliating . . . loss of face and prestige for President Park.”47 Because a substantial part of this document remains classified, the exact nature of the telegram exchanges between the U.S. embassy in Seoul and the State Department from December 1975 to January 1976 cannot be determined. However, given Sneider’s telegram of December 10, 1975, which called for an explicit warning to Park on the danger of conflict across the whole range of security and political relationships between the two countries and his other telegram of January 5, 1976, which urged the reconsideration of the “disruptive” U.S.
policy toward South Korea, it is likely that the United States was driving Park into a corner in the months of December 1975 and January 1976.
At the end, Park agreed to hold off the nuclear deal with France, but at the same time, he continued to press for U.S. compensation in return for the upcoming cancellation of negotiation talks. By the time Sneider met Nam Tôk-u on January 14, 1976, it was clear that a group of U.S. officials would fly in from Washington to hammer out the details of South Korea’s cancellation of the French deal.48 Although the United States had already secured French and Canadian assurance to abide by the IAEA safeguards and NPT regulations in their provision of reprocessing technologies to South Korea, it strove to cancel the French deal in order to weed out any possibility of South Korea’s clandestine development of nuclear weapons
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and the risk of triggering a nuclear arms race in the region. At the same time, the superpower must have considered the need to protect commercial interests for the U.S. nuclear industry from the threat of French penetration into the South Korean market. Under mounting pressure from the United States, Park broke off the deal with France. Whether he had folded his nuclear ambitions as well was not certain. For the time being the United States had succeeded in putting the brakes on Park’s nuclear program by getting him to stop the French reprocessing deal.49
Park’s Nuclear Calculus
The cancellation of the French deal makes Park’s intentions even more perplexing. At first glance, Park looked like he lacked a sound security motive in developing nuclear weapons. The United States, after all, had deployed tactical nuclear weapons, including Honest John nuclear missiles, as early as January 1958 in order to back up its security commitment to South Korea.50 To be sure, Park perceived this security commitment as wavering because of the Guam Doctrine, despite the continued presence of tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea. Like many others there, Park feared that the United States could remove its nuclear umbrella as unilaterally and abruptly as it had decided to withdraw the Seventh Infantry Division in 1971. Similarly, there was no guarantee that the United States would not withdraw the remaining U.S. ground troops from South Korea. To intensify Park’s fears even more, the change in U.S. military policy coincided with an alarming rise in North Korea’s conventional military threat in the early 1970s.
However, these tides of change only explain that South Korea faced a security crisis, not that its options were restricted to nuclear development.
Park could have concentrated his efforts on increasing South Korea’s conventional military capabilities if his objective was simply to counterbalance North Korean conventional military capabilities. Moreover, Park had been actively engaging in a conventional military buildup under the Forces Improvement Plan (1974–1981), according to which South Korea was to outspend the North in defense expenditures by 1976.
To explain Park’s strong commitment to the nuclear option, it is necessary to go beyond the macro analysis of aggregate military data and look at the geopolitical nature of South Korean defense in depth. As a retired army general, Park was aware of South Korea’s strategic vulnerabilities that could not be reduced by simply adding to conventional military capabilities. Given the extraordinary proximity of Seoul, the capital city with a
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third of the nation’s population and economic concerns, to the demilitarized zone (about 30 miles), South Korea was extremely vulnerable to a surprise attack. The North knew of this geopolitical weakness, locating its heavy artillery forces along the demilitarized zone in order to put the northern part of Seoul within range of artillery attack. Because any North Korean surprise attack could devastate heavily populated Seoul within hours, the South thought war would be disastrous even if it won the war.
Moreover, Park feared that given the geopolitical realities, the North might choose to launch an attack to occupy only Seoul and then to negotiate an armistice with the United States, knowing that the superpower would be extremely reluctant to engage in another war on the Asian continent after its Vietnam debacle. For Park, the key issue was political rather than military. Distrusting U.S. intentions, Park thought that he had to opt for nuclearization in order to make the North give up any thought of waging a total or a limited war. Ce
rtainly, as a geographically small country, South Korea could not contemplate having a second-strike nuclear capability, which would argue against the nuclear option. However, within the context of wavering U.S. security commitments, Park could easily have thought that the possession of a primitive nuclear weapon or even the mere ability to produce a nuclear weapon could deter the North from a surprise attack in the fear of “an armed conflict escalating into a nuclear war.”51 Park wanted to instill in North Korea the fear of nuclear annihila-tion.52
What Park thought about the consequences of the nuclear proliferation that his strategy was likely to trigger remains unknown. It is easy to imagine that South Korea’s development of nuclear weapons would provoke the North to do the same. This would be consistent with North Korea’s massive conventional military buildup, especially in its offensive capabilities, that was initiated in 1976.53 The prospect that Japan would jump on the nuclear bandwagon was also a possibility, throwing the entire Northeast Asian region into a nuclear arms race. The actions of South Korea, in other words, would trigger the others’ counteractions, which were likely to worsen rather than ameliorate South Korea’s security dilemmas. In contrast to the lack of information regarding Park’s thinking about the threat of nuclear proliferation and its impact on long-term South Korean security interests, there is no ambiguity regarding U.S. preferences. The superpower looked at Park’s nuclear program as directly threatening U.S. interests in East Asia. Whereas Park could have entertained the thought that a totally nuclearized East Asia could be stable by instilling in the new nuclear states the fear of mutual destruction, which would make them more cautious before venturing into a belligerent act,54 the United States could
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only conclude that nuclear proliferation damaged its security interests irreparably by reducing its influence over both allies and foes.
Domestic politics also mattered in South Korea’s choice of nuclearization. The way it mattered, however, was different from the other theoretically more well known cases, where the nuclear option was decided jointly by the nuclear energy establishment of state-run laboratories and civilian institutions, military, and politicians frequently driven by their narrow parochial interests without consideration of the wider geopolitical consequences of the acquisition of nuclear weapons.55 By contrast, in the case of South Korea, the decision to pursue nuclearization was made decisively by Park before as well as after the promulgation of the yushin constitution in 1972. Although the U.S. embassy in Seoul once entertained the idea that bureaucratic politics might be encouraging Park to pursue the construction of a nuclear reprocessing plant,56 the available evidence shows that bureaucratic rivalries and politics did not figure in as a factor in South Korea’s decision to make nuclear bombs. This lack of bureaucratic drivers, however, does not relegate domestic politics to a marginal place. On the contrary, the extreme level of concentration of power in Park constituted the enabling factor that allowed him to dominate the agenda setting, choose the high-risk nuclearization strategy, orchestrate the clandestine pursuit of nuclear weapon and missile development, and swiftly change gears toward negotiation, once the United States came down hard on the purchase of reprocessing technology.
At the same time, the vision of self-defense should not be underestimated in the explanation of Park’s nuclear decision. Park’s senior aides recollect that he was a man thoroughly humiliated by his unsuccessful pleas to the United States for the delay, if not the reversal, of partial U.S.
ground troop withdrawal in the early 1970s. This humiliation came after Park’s domestically risky decision to commit combat troops to fight the Vietnam War alongside the hard-pressed U.S. military forces, the combination of which made Park bitter toward his unreliable and, worse, “unfaithful” ally. He was also troubled by the U.S. refusal to militarily punish North Korea for its commando attack on the Blue House in January 1968
and its guerrilla infiltration into the Uljin-Samch’ôk area in November of that year. By contrast, the eagerness of the United States to negotiate with the North over the release of the USS Pueblo crew confirmed Park’s perception that the United States cared only for American lives and interests (see Chapter 14). This long list of what Park saw as U.S. betrayals shows that his talk of self-defense was not only rhetoric for domestic political consumption. On the contrary, Park wanted greater independence from the United States. As he saw it, having nuclear weapons constituted the
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quickest way to achieve independence as well as to ensure South Korea’s national security in the absence of a firm U.S. commitment.
The regional danger of nuclear proliferation appears to have been considered in Park’s nuclear calculus, but not in the way the United States calculated. Whereas the ally saw Park as the villain who could trigger a nuclear arms race in Northeast Asia, Park saw his move as a defensive action against Japan, which already had its own reprocessing plant in Tokai Mura. Although Park never openly expressed his thoughts on Japan’s nuclear program, it was a source of both fear and envy for him.57 When combined with Japan’s missile capabilities, which gave it the possibility of developing its own independent formula for deterrence in another time,58
South Korea could well have aimed at becoming another Japan, a non-nuclear power that could become a nuclear power in a rapid fashion if South Korean security was threatened even more.
However, alternatively, it is possible that Park never intended to develop nuclear weapons, and instead pursued his program only to gain bargaining leverage against the United States. If this was his intention, he badly miscalculated. The nuclear issue was too critical for the United States to accept the principle of nonproliferation as an object of negotiation. Moreover, given its hegemonic presence in South Korea’s economic, political, and military institutions, the United States could subdue Park’s nuclear ambition by threats of sanctions and force. In addition to the option of canceling the EX-IM Bank loan for South Korea’s nuclear program, the United States had a massive power advantage stemming from South Korea’s structural dependence on the United States for both prosperity and security. Park could not have lost sight of the fact that the United States imported over half of South Korea’s exports, as well as underwriting its military security. Sneider’s diplomatic efforts during the months of December 1975 and January 1976 aimed to make clear to Park that any further move on nuclearization could only jeopardize South Korea’s future.
Sneider’s decisive and unambiguous intervention brought about a moment of truth. Until then, no one in South Korea, including even Park, had talked about the nuclear program in anything other than the context of the peaceful uses of atomic energy, with the intention to hide the nuclear weapons program from the United States. Once the United States confirmed Park’s nuclear intentions and began pressing hard for the abandonment of his plans, Park swiftly changed his strategy from one of silently acquiring fissile materials to that of negotiating for U.S. concessions. Park revealed his views on nuclear armament openly in his interview with Robert D. Novak of the Washington Post on June 12, 1975, in which he argued that South Korea had to go nuclear if the U.S. nuclear umbrella were
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to be removed. In an interview with the Korea Herald on June 26, 1975, science and technology minister Ch’oe Hyông-sôp openly supported Park’s statement by saying that South Korea had already acquired the capacity for developing nuclear weapons.
In many of the telegrams exchanged between the State Department and the U.S. embassy in Seoul during the critical mid-1970s, it was the telegram of December 11, 1974, that reported South Korea’s possible intention to develop nuclear weapons for the first time. After that, in the telegram dated February 26, 1975, Sneider reported on his meeting with foreign minister Kim Tong-jo, where he demanded South Korea’s early ratification of the NPT. In this he was joined by the Canadians, in the middle of negotiations with South Korea on the sale of CANDU technology.59<
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By March 4, 1975, the State Department agreed with the U.S. embassy in Seoul that South Korea was proceeding with initial phases of nuclear weapons development.60 In July of that same year, the United States implicitly revealed its knowledge of the South Korean nuclear weapons program by having Sneider meet with Ch’oe Hyông-sôp, Kim Tong-jo, and Kim Chông-ryôm in succession to argue against South Korea’s construction of a reprocessing plant, but without directly mentioning the nuclear weapons program in order to avoid direct confrontation with Park.61
In August 1975, after Park’s interview with Novak, U.S. defense secretary James R. Schlesinger, with Sneider, met with Park to warn of the negative impact of South Korea’s nuclear weapons program on U.S.–South Korean relations. In the meeting, Park denied any intention to develop nuclear weapons and assured Schlesinger of his commitment to the NPT.
Then Park went on to explain his interview with Novak as a hypothetical statement, explaining what South Korea would do in the event of the removal of U.S. nuclear deterrence. The corollary was that there would be no South Korean nuclear weapons if the United States continued its provision of a nuclear umbrella. If he had not announced the nuclear option in the event of the removal of U.S. nuclear deterrence, Park argued, it was certain that the morale of the South Korean people would suffer a blow in the uncertain post–Vietnam War era of U.S. military retrenchment.62
Park Chung Hee Era Page 72