On the sidewalks, Lee Jae Sang, a 28-year-old office worker, already had an idea of how to respond to North Korea’s rapidly growing ability to drop nuclear bombs across borders and oceans. “Our country must also develop a nuclear program. “And prepare for a possible nuclear war,” Lee said, expressing the desire shown by a February poll that 3 in 4 South Koreans share. It is a point that people and politicians of non-nuclear powers around the world are most often affected by, at a destabilizing moment in more than half a century of global nuclear non-proliferation efforts, exacerbated by the daily example of nuclear Russia dismantling non-nuclear Ukraine. This review by non-nuclear states is playing out in Asia. The region is home to an increasingly powerful North Korea, China, Russia and Iran – three nuclear powers and an almost nuclear power – but is vulnerable to the kind of nuclear umbrella and broad defense alliance that has shielded NATO nations for decades. Vulnerable countries will look at lessons from Ukraine – especially if Russia manages to swallow large parts of Ukraine while wielding its nuclear arsenal to keep other nations away – as they consider retaining or pursuing nuclear weapons, security experts say . Equally important, they say, is how well the US and its allies persuade other partners in Europe, the Persian Gulf and Asia to trust the US-led nuclear and conventional arsenal shield and not pursue their own nuclear bombs. . For leaders concerned about unfriendly nuclear-armed neighbors, “they will say to their domestic audience: ‘Please support our nuclear weapons because you see what happened in Ukraine, right?’ said Mariana Budjeryn, a researcher with the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. As a student in Soviet-era Ukraine in the 1980s, Budjeryn looked at how to dress for radioactive burns and other possible nuclear war injuries while the country was home to some 5,000 Soviet Union nuclear weapons. Her country gave up developing nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union, opting for financial aid and integration with the West and security guarantees. “Ultimately, I think a lot depends on the outcome of this war on how we understand the value of nuclear weapons,” Budjeryn said. Around the world, the US military is reassuring strategic partners facing nuclear-backed adversaries. Near the border with North Korea this month, white ballistic missiles were fired into the night sky as the United States joined South Korea in its first joint ballistic test launches in five years. It was a strong response to the launch of at least 18 ballistic missiles by North Korea this year. In Europe and the Persian Gulf, President Joe Biden and US generals, diplomats and troops are moving to countries bordering Russia and to oil-producing countries bordering Iran. Biden and his top lieutenants pledge that the United States is committed to thwarting nuclear threats from Iran, North Korea and others. In China, President Xi Jinping combines an aggressive foreign policy with one of his country’s biggest nuclear weapons pressures. Some top former Asian officials have cited Ukraine, saying it is time for more non-nuclear nations to consider acquiring nuclear weapons or hosting US ones. “I do not think that either Japan or South Korea want to become a nuclear-armed state. It will be extremely painful politically and internally divisive. But what are the alternatives? ” Former Singaporean Foreign Minister Bilahari Kausikan told an audience at a defense forum in March. For those hoping that North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons, the example set by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “another nail in the coffin,” said Terence Roehrig, a national security professor at the U.S. Naval War College. , at another defense forum in April. “Ukraine will be another example for North Korea of countries like Iraq and Libya that have given up their nuclear capabilities – and look what happened to them,” Roehrig said. Ukraine has never had a nuclear bomb ready to explode – at least, no one could detonate it on its own. The collapse of the Soviet Union left Ukraine with the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world. But Ukraine had no operational control. It left this in the weakest hand in the 1990s, when it negotiated with the United States, Russia and others over its place in the post-Soviet world and the fate of the Soviet arsenal. Ukraine has received assurances but no assurances about its security, Budjeryn said. “A piece of paper” is the way in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy referred to such an assurance, signed in 1994. The United States itself has given countries that are curious about nuclear and nuclear weapons many reasons to worry about giving up the world’s deadliest weapons. The West forced Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to abandon his country’s basic nuclear weapons program in 2003. A few years later, Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam shared with researcher Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer his father’s greatest concern. that – that Western nations would support an uprising against him. “And here we are, a few years later, in 2011, you saw what happened,” said Braut-Hegghammer, now a professor of nuclear and security strategy at the University of Oslo. What happened was that NATO, at the urging of the United States, intervened in a 2011 internal uprising against Gaddafi. A NATO warplane bombed his entourage. The rebels captured the Libyan leader, tortured and killed him. In Iraq, the United States has played a key role in forcing Saddam Hussein to abandon his nuclear program. The United States then ousted Saddam in 2003 with a false allegation that it was reassembling a nuclear weapons effort. Three years later, with Iraq still under US occupation, Saddam sank into a gallows. The fall of Middle Eastern leaders and the brutal deaths have clouded denuclearization efforts with North Korea. Rare US-North Korean talks in 2018 collapsed after the Trump administration repeatedly set the “Libya model” and Vice President Mike Pence threatened Kim Jong Un with Gaddafi’s fate. “Ignorant and foolish,” the North Korean government replied. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “only emphasizes in some countries, at least, that if you have a nuclear weapons program, and you are a bit far from it, giving it up is a terrible idea,” said Braut-Hegghammer. The world’s nine nuclear powers — the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea — have about 13,000 nuclear weapons. Israel does not recognize its nuclear program. The major nuclear powers have historically tried to control which countries can legally join the club. Countries that move independently, including Iran and North Korea, are isolated and subject to sanctions. Nuclear experts cite South Korea and Saudi Arabia as the countries most likely to consider nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018 pledged to acquire nuclear bombs immediately if Iran did so. “It’s amazing that most countries have not acquired a bomb,” said Jessica Cox, head of NATO’s nuclear directorate, at the April forum. “If you look at it from a historical perspective, it is not at all clear in the 1950s and 1960s that there would be less than 10 nuclear-armed nations in the world… 70 years later.” What made the difference in Europe was NATO’s nuclear deterrent – 30 nations share responsibility and decision-making for a nuclear arsenal that prevents attacks on all, Cox said. Many believe that Ukraine made the right decision when it avoided possible isolation by relinquishing a future with nuclear weapons. This gave Ukraine three decades to integrate into the world economy and form alliances with powerful nations that are now helping to defend itself against Russia. As a young woman in Ukraine, Budjeryn realized sometime after the 1990s agreements that her own business development business was funded by the Clinton administration as part of the West’s rewards in Ukraine for the nuclear deal. “If Ukraine prevails,” he said, “then it will announce that nuclear weapons are useless.” “But if Ukraine falls, the story will be very different,” he said.
Chang reported from Seoul.
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