Print newspapers remain highly influential in South Korea, none more so than the Chosun Ilbo, the country’s leading daily. (To put its dominance in context, consider that the Chosun Ilbo has a print circulation of 1.8 million, while the U.S.’s top-selling newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, sells about a million print copies each day. The United States, by the way, has more than six times the population of South Korea.) So it’s a pretty big deal that the Chosun Ilbo has come out with a staff editorial calling on South Korea to seriously consider acquiring nuclear weapons. (Korean version here; English translation here.)
South Korea formally renounced any nuclear ambitions in 1991, when it concluded a “Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” with North Korea. The agreement said that neither country would “test, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons.” Suffice it to say, Pyongyang has failed to live up to its side of the arrangement. But the South, for the most part, has entrusted its survival to the United States and eschewed pursuing its own nuclear deterrent.
Now, however, the Chosun Ilbo argues that it’s time for a re-evaluation of that policy. And it’s not shy in casting blame for the situation, either. “The U.S. has passed the buck for taming North Korea to China, and China is doing nothing,” the paper thunders, “Would China come to the rescue if the North launched a nuclear attack against South Korea? Would the U.S. step in to protect Seoul? Judging by Washington’s inaction in the military crises in the Ukraine and Syria, it would probably respond only after Seoul has been turned into a pile of smoldering ashes.”
On my last visit to Seoul, I met with several figures in the South Korean military who assured me the South Korea-United States alliance was as strong as ever. But it appears that the Chosun Ilbo‘s sentiments are increasingly widespread: Several prominent politicians in the ruling Saenuri party have recently come out in favor of going nuclear, reports NK News. Opinion surveys also show large majorities of South Koreans supporting a nuclear deterrent.
It would be a sad irony if President Obama’s failure to enforce his red line in Syria spurred South Korea to cross a red line of its own.
