Korea’s Nuclear Landscape: Past and Present

The Korean Peninsula is no stranger to nuclear weapons. The quest to build a Korean bomb goes back to Kim Il Sung’s efforts in the 1950s. Beginning in 1958, the United States deployed multiple nuclear weapons systems in the South, reaching a peak of more than 900 warheads in 1967. A decade later, South Korean President Park Chung-hee was pursuing a clandestine nuclear program when U.S. President Jimmy Carter began calling for the withdrawal of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, the last of which were removed from South Korea in 1991 under a disarmament initiative by President George H.W. Bush.

Despite the removal and a 1992 North-South joint declaration to denuclearize the peninsula, tensions have only increased, reaching multiple crisis points over the last quarter-century. Pyongyang’s 2002 admission that it had a uranium enrichment program was followed by its 2003 withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

In the years since, major advances in North Korea’s missile program and six underground explosive nuclear tests, including what it claimed was a “super-large hydrogen bomb” in 2017, continue to fuel tensions. During the first Trump administration, Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump exchanged apocalyptic threats, then so-called “love letters,” followed by two summits that proved to be duds.

The Korean Peninsula has remained one of the world’s most volatile nuclear flashpoints and an ongoing source of concern. Since 2017, South Korean public opinion surveys have shown growing support for the country to obtain its own nuclear weapon. A Chey Institute For Advanced Studies 2023 report, citing a survey commissioned from Gallup Korea, noted that more than 77 percent of respondents “agreed that [South] Korea needs to develop indigenous nuclear weapons.”

In 2023, then-President Yoon Suk-yeol explicitly stated that South Korea could deploy tactical nuclear weapons or rapidly develop its own. Others have argued that a South Korean nuclear weapon could “contain” North Korea.

A 2024 Center for Strategic International Studies report challenged those high poll numbers, presenting a significantly different perspective from what author Victor Cha described as “strategic elites” (legislators, officials, experts, etc.). People in this group were much less supportive of a South Korean nuclear weapon (66 percent opposed or uncertain). Cha said the 34 percent support rate was “a better indicator of the current attitudes of South Korea toward the nuclear option.”

Lee Young-ah, manager of the Center for Peace and Disarmament at People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, a South Korean NGO, said that public support for nuclear weapons varies widely depending on factors including the possibility of prolonged economic sanctions if Seoul were to withdraw from the NPT and a bilateral agreement on "peaceful nuclear cooperation" with the United States. Lee pointed to a Seoul National University study that indicated support for nuclear armament could fall significantly if doing so would cause a major rift in the South Korea-U.S. alliance.

In contrast to a campaign to collect 10 million signatures in support of a South Korean nuclear weapon, Lee points to a member of parliament, Lee Jae-jung, who, along with other South Korean and Japanese lawmakers, launched an initiative to establish a Northeast Asia Nuclear-Weapon Free Zone.

But the geopolitical landscape has shifted significantly in recent years, with North Korea and Russia cooperation deepening, heightened inter-Korean tensions, and political instability in South Korea. In April, the U.S. designated South Korea, its own ally, a “sensitive country,” which entails additional restrictions on access to U.S. research facilities.

Alexis Dudden, a University of Connecticut history professor specializing in modern Korea and Japan, pointed out that the U.S. divided the Korean Peninsula at the 38th parallel immediately after the bombing of Nagasaki. “In so doing, the places we now call North and South Korea are the first states born of the nuclear age and so in that way of thinking, both are all-nuclear, all the time,” Dudden said.

Unseen Scars 

Today as South Korean academics, politicians, and the public debate the political and economic costs of obtaining nuclear weapons, there is another group who can speak with graphic specificity on the topic. They were on the ground when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They smelt the smoke and felt the flames on those horrific summer days in 1945. For South Korea’s wonpok piheija 원폭치해자 (atomic bomb victims) and their descendants, nuclear weapons represent a painful and enduring, multigenerational open wound.

According to Japanese government records, in late 1944, more than 81,000 Koreans were living in Hiroshima Prefecture and over 59,500 in Nagasaki Prefecture. Their presence was the result of the Korean Peninsula’s colonization by Japan, and, increasingly in the latter years of the war, the exploitation of Korean labor to support Japan’s imperial and military ambitions.

Estimates by the Association of A-bomb Victims of South Korea suggest the combined number of Korean victims (those subjected to the atomic bombs) for Hiroshima and Nagasaki range from 70,000 to 100,000 with between 40,000 to 50,000 deaths. The exact total number of all deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, regardless of nationality, will never be known, but the tremendous scale of destruction, death, and suffering is indisputable.