When the US Walks Away

The Seoul, Korea, based Korean Herald, an English language newspaper, has a piece on South Korean nuclear ambitions.  Here is a little insight into what we do and don't know about the nuclear programs of others:

Global Asia, a publication of the East Asia Foundation in Seoul, said the previously secret U.S. documents show that South Korea continued to develop nuclear weapons at least two years after Washington thought it had ceased during the 1970s.

And South Korea is an ally.

For me the nutgraf♠ is here:

Chung, Global Asia’s editor-in-chief and a professor at Yonsei University, and Hayes, director of the Nautilus Institute and a member of Global Asia’s editorial board, claimed Seoul’s former nuclear ambition was “largely triggered by eroding or ambiguous security assurances from Washington.”

When the US umbrella is being pulled away you look for other ways to secure your sovereignty.  It is as simple as that.

As a counterbalance, the scholar who looked at this issue noted that

as demonstrated by the crisis in 1976 involving perceptions of a threat from North Korea, it was not nuclear deterrence but rather conventional deterrence that managed to contain the crisis by convincing the North that conventional weapons possessed by the U.S. and South Korea, not nuclear weapons, posed the greatest threat to the North.

I think that it was conventional forces, backed by a known nuclear capability.  The two work together.

So, as we consider withdrawing from this or that corner of the world we have to realize we are changing some basic structures and nations local to the area will re-prioritize, and that might include a desire for nuclear weapons.

There is no free lunch and once having ventured out into the world we have disturbed it and how it settles down as we wander home is something we need to think about.  As al Qaeda has shown us, there are some bad guys out there and they know where we life.

This is not to argue that we shouldn't pull back, but to make the point that we need to do such retrenchment intelligently and with hedges here and there to help keep the peace.  We aren't going to be able to pull back completely without some corresponding huge increase in our military expenditures, or our risk, one.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  I picked that term up from something Michael Yon wrote over the weekend.