hankyoreh

President Yoon Suk-yeol of South Korea sits beside Joseph S. Nye Jr., a professor emeritus at Harvard, as he takes a question from the audience following his address at Harvard Kennedy School on April 28. (Yonhap)

Doubts are being raised about the credibility of South Korean President Yoon’s Suk-yeol’s claim during a speech at Harvard University on Friday that Korea has the technological foundation to acquire a nuclear arsenal within a year if it made up its mind to do so.

Yoon’s remarks came two days after South Korea and the US released the Washington Declaration, which establishes a Nuclear Consultative Group but rejects the idea of Korea developing its own nuclear weapons or the US redeploying tactical nuclear weapons in the country.

Setting aside the diplomatic ramifications of withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, experts disagree about whether it’s technically feasible for South Korea to develop nuclear weapons within a year, as the president claimed.

Suh Kune-yull, an emeritus professor of nuclear engineering at Seoul National University, is one of the researchers who have said that Korea, given the will to do so, could develop nuclear detonators and ballistic missiles or other delivery vehicles within six months. Simulations on a supercomputer would eliminate the need to physically test a nuclear device, those researchers said.

But others point to the inherent difficulty of securing the uranium and plutonium needed for nuclear warheads without the consent of the US government. Furthermore, they say, going nuclear would still take a number of years because of the technical challenges.

To develop nuclear weapons, South Korea would first have to revise its civil nuclear cooperation agreement with the US, which bans Korea from producing highly enriched uranium or reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. That’s something the US is very unlikely to support, given its strong opposition to nuclear proliferation.

Korea’s technological capabilities in the area remain untested. Extracting large quantities of plutonium from spent fuel for use in nuclear weapons requires large-scale reprocessing facilities, and while Korea has some technical expertise in reprocessing research and development, it has never actually used that technology.

Many analysts estimate it would take at least six months just to set up a nuclear development team that would assemble nuclear experts and equipment currently scattered around the country’s research institutes and schools.

Korea’s detonator technology is also thought to be lacking.

“Quite a few untested claims are being made about Korea’s nuclear armament. It would take a considerable amount of time and money to build facilities for nuclear warhead research, development and production,” said Cheong Wook-Sik, director of the Hankyoreh Peace Institute.

Cho Tae-yong, director of Korea’s National Security Office, tried to downplay the controversy by explaining that Yoon didn’t mean that Korea actually intends to go nuclear when he said that nuclear armament would be possible within a year.

“Even if we’re technically capable of nuclear armament, actually doing so would carry major costs politically, diplomatically and economically,” Cho said in an interview with YTN, a Korean television news channel, on Monday.

By Kwon Hyuk-chul, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]