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.