South Korea and the Bomb

Jeffrey Lewis 0:01

I think now it's off to the wiener bark. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in the nice bit of California.

Aaron Stein 0:27

And I'm Aaron Stein. I'm a contributor to the arms control long blog. I'm a senior fellow at the Atlantic Councils for the career center for the Middle East. But I'm not in the nice bit of California now, Aaron. No, you're not. You're you're you're in Europe.

Jeffrey 0:40

Yep. I'm in the big wiener.

Aaron 0:43

The second stop on your European tour. Yeah, I did Paris and now I'm in Vienna. This is a tough life for you.

Jeffrey 0:51

I'm tired. I have done seven talks in five days.

Aaron 0:54

Yeah. I have no sympathy because I saw you tweeting pictures of food.

Jeffrey 0:59

Food in Paris was great. I can imagine. Food in Vienna is good. Food in Paris is great. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. But I've actually had a shocking amount of pizza on this trip. Really? Yeah. Actually, the best meal I had in Paris and the best meal I had in Vienna were both pizzas.

Aaron 1:20

So they've adopted Italian food as their national dish, just like us?

Jeffrey 1:27

Oh, no. Neither of these pizzas bore any resemblance to anything an Italian would make. They were both wonderful, but they were their own things.

Aaron 1:34

Right. Now I'm jealous. That sounds really good.

Jeffrey 1:37

Yeah, it was a lot of anchovies. I don't know. Do people like anchovies on pizza? I never see them in the U.S.

Aaron 1:43

I don't, but probably somebody does. You do. I do.

Jeffrey 1:46

I love anchovies on a spicy, spicy sauce. It's good. Well, our listeners are probably wondering what the hell we're going to talk about today. Yeah, no, definitely not food. But we can talk about food. But let's talk about plutonium and nuclear weapons and South Korean nuclear weapons, notional South Korean nuclear weapons.

Aaron 2:08

Yeah, we thought we would break it up after just podcast after podcast about the North Koreans.

Jeffrey 2:15

Anna Fifield, one of our favorite reporters in the Washington Post, did a nice little story that picked up on – it was what? A piece in the Chosun Ilbo talking about how quickly South Korea could build nuclear weapons?

Aaron 2:28

Yes. Did you see that, Aaron? I did. It brings up a lot of the fun stuff that we talk about here on the Arms Control Walk podcast. Actually, what we talked about last week was – How notionally states can develop nuclear weapons, the process that they take, some of the assumptions that we make, or at least a lot of people make about the processes to do so.

And South Korea has dabbled in weapons design, or at least some questionable experiments in the 1970s, 1980s.

Jeffrey 2:56

Yeah, you know, it's one of those things where I often hear this in relationship to Japan, right? People talk about them being like a screw turn away from a nuclear weapon. And I think it's always more complicated than that and more complicated in kind of really interesting ways. We're also having a party here. It's the end of the day in Vienna and the wine is already starting to flow.

So listeners should be happy that I'm making a podcast for you instead of drinking some Gruner Weltweiler.

Aaron 3:21

That's true. No, but... Anyways, pick up where you left off.

Jeffrey 3:28

Well, so what I was saying is that we say a country could build a nuclear weapon really quickly. And I think sometimes that that's kind of a shorthand. We put a really specific number, like six months. And what we really mean is fast. But in reality, I think it actually always takes a lot longer than that. And so I thought that would be an interesting thing for us to try to like disentangle.

Like if South Korea wanted nuclear weapons, what would they actually do? How long would it actually take? And would that process introduce the opportunity to try to convince them to do something less crazy instead?

Aaron 4:03

Yeah. Yeah, the screw turn away from the bomb phrase is, again, I don't like it either, but it's notionally tied to, in other states, to the breakout time or to the amount of stockpiled plutonium that they have. So if they have the requisite amount of fissile material on hand or if they're trying to produce it, it's X, Y, Z amount of months away from, quote, unquote, being nuclear armed.

This is the breakout debate that we talked about with Iran. Whereas weapons design comes in, and I think for you and I, it's far more interesting.

Jeffrey 4:34

Yeah, it's one of those things where – I think because people assume that the decision to build a nuclear weapon must be like a deeply rational and strategic decision, that often the kind of role of the entrepreneur who pushes the idea or the kind of twists and turns as a country tries to do it clandestinely or tries to get away with it on the cheap – Those are like the most interesting parts of proliferation stories, but they're like the parts that fit our mental models of why states build nuclear weapons the worst.

And so the triumph of theory over interesting facts often leads them to get written out. But yeah, South Korea had a bomb program.

Aaron 5:17

It did. Tell us about it.

Jeffrey 5:20

So it comes up in my class that I teach at the Middlebury Institute. In the 1970s, General Park, daddy to President Park, wanted to buy a Canadian heavy water reactor. You know, like for really straightforward reasons. At the time, the Nixon administration was considering producing the number of troops there. And, you know, General Park was not terribly popular in the United States because he was a human rights suppressing dictator.

And so he was always worried that the U.S. was going to like throw him to the wolves. And so he tried to buy a heavy water reactor and the Nixon administration leaned on him really heavily. And he allegedly stopped the program. But there's some evidence that the program picked back up again after the Carter administration tried and failed to withdraw U.S. ground forces.

Right.

Aaron 6:19

And so a lot of this came to light relatively recently about safeguards violations that came out. I think it was in the 2000s. It was right around 2005, if I'm remembering offhand correctly. About some of the – am I right, 2005?

Jeffrey 6:36

I was going to say it was maybe earlier than that. It was like 2003, 2004. But our Wi-Fi is not so good, so there's no way that I can look it up.

Aaron 6:44

I remember because it was tagged to the stuff about the Iranian program. Do you agree to safeguard – Violations differently in two different states in the way the IAA handled it. But more importantly, what we learned about those safeguard violations, as you said, suggests that interest in plutonium continued after the CANDU was not, after they didn't import the CANDU because of U.S. pressure.

Jeffrey 7:10

Yeah, you know, I was having this interesting conversation. Actually, the last time I was in Tokyo, there's a guy at Princeton who is writing what I think is going to be a pretty interesting book on the role of alliances in proliferation. And we were talking about the South Korean case study. And one of his big questions, and I think I agree it's a question, is so we all know that they had this weapons program in the 70s.

We all know that they said they stopped it under pressure from the next administration and that part of that was not purchasing the reactor from Canada that would have been used in the weapons program. But at the same time, we know that they continued with their missile program. Right. And so the natural question was, did the nuclear program restart?

And then when South Korea acceded to the additional protocol in the early 2000s, they had to admit a series of safeguards violations involving both plutonium and enriched uranium, most of which happened in the early 1980s, which would be consistent with a sort of continuing enthusiasm for nuclear weapons, but at least one of which occurred as late as 2000.

Aaron 8:30

Just go into them. I mean, I think it's always interesting to see when states take two routes to the bomb, potentially, allegedly, to either diversify their options or more sophisticated weapons designs, how they then do that within the bureaucracy. I'm thinking about the Iranian program because that's really where my expertise lies and how they approach that. And what that tells us about the screw turn away from the bomb Like, what are the steps involved for actual weapons design?

And how long would it take?

Jeffrey 9:01

Yeah, well, I haven't, you know, the safeguards violations are about nuclear material. So it's very hard to know if they ever did any design work. But it was clear that they were continuing to look at plutonium as a route through the early 1980s. And then there's this whole other universe of South Korean research on laser isotope separation.

Which is just such an unusual and strange technology for them to pick and sustain and interest in. The Iranian state? Yeah. Well, I think – I mean I think the reason is because it's hard to detect. Right. It is. Right. And so I think that a lot of countries get enthusiastic about the fact that it's going to be hard to detect technology.

And so then they fool around with it. But then it's also hard to do, or at least it historically has been hard to do. So they don't get anywhere. But it's, you know, you always end up looking at those laser isotope separation programs thinking like, what are you guys really up to? Right, right. So it's kind of a mystery to me.

I mean, I can't say confidently that the program definitely continued into the 1980s. But the missile program did and, you know, has now borne fruit as like a, you know, real thing. Real serious short-range missile program. But whether or when or why they were doing various things they didn't feel the obligation to tell the IAEA about is one of those really enduring mysteries.

Aaron 10:40

I think it's interesting because it raises questions about if it was linked to the missile program. What that would tell you about the thinking that they were doing about warhead design from, or I guess weapons design from the beginning. And it's like what we were talking about with the North Koreans last week, Fat Man, Little Boy. They aren't taking the same routes that one expects.

Implosion, Fat Man type bomb moving forward sequentially like the United States and the Soviet Union did. But they're trying to skip steps, again, assuming that it was linked to the missile program. And also, I mean, I think just picking up on a thread that we were talking about earlier is that the way it appears to be linked to problems with the U.S. or the alliance with the U.S., then you have to bring up into that the forward deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in South Korea.

Jeffrey 11:36

Right, which actually is what the case study that we do with the Carter administration focuses on, because Carter had decided not only to remove ground troops, but he had decided to remove all of the nuclear weapons, not just nuclear weapons assigned to the ground forces, but also the aircraft delivered bombs. And obviously he gets totally rolled by his own bureaucracy and is unable to do this thing.

But, you know, one of my favorite, like, stories from that, I don't know if I've told you this before, Aaron, but they... For a while, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. And so they float this totally absurd idea that we'll take all of the bombs out, but we'll leave inert training shapes. There, so they would like take the bombs out, but like not tell the South Koreans. You must be joking. No, no, no. It actually, it leaked at the time. Good. Yes, yes. A defense official was sort of making fun of it because he was, he was saying like, yeah, obviously the problem is, you know, you have the inert training shapes there, and you know whatever, some private writes home that you know he's wasting all this time guarding like sacks of flour, and then the whole thing is blown and

Aaron 12:49

You're like way worse off than you would have been just taking them out right that's absurdity i mean it goes to show how perceptions of nuclear weapon govern you know alliance management amongst you know the u.s and south korea in this case is and i think the south koreans do you think that they were trying to play that game too so maybe threatening to develop nuclear weapons as a means to coerce the united states to give them more of whatever it is that they wanted

Jeffrey 13:15

Oh, no, no. I think they were like genuinely terrified that we were going to totally abandon them. And, you know, I also think, you know, one thing that's really interesting is we tracked down some of the photographs of General Park watching the first South Korean missile firings. And those were front page news at the time in South Korea.

And what's so interesting about the images is, you know what they look exactly like? No, I've never seen it. They look exactly like the current images of Kim Jong-un watching missile firings. It's like – you know how Kim Jong-un is outside? Yeah. And he has like the little table in front of him and he has like the little binoculars, that whole kind of – would you call it a visual vernacular?

Yeah, I like that. Like that whole thing? So we always thought that that was like a North Korean thing. But General Park did it first.

Aaron 14:19

And so you think that there was overt signaling about... Yeah, absolutely. That's interesting. Again, because my mind always goes to the Iranian program because of my own specific research interest. What we know about their bomb design is that it was specifically geared around missile delivery systems. And if South Korea was the same way, you can even make arguments that the North Koreans are beginning through their pictures last week.

It's the same thing. It's that. People are just jumping the queue, as I like to say, and that they're looking for more miniaturized designs right from the get-go because at the end of the day, the way we think about nuclear weapons is essentially a 1945-style design that countries can now skip for a sure number of reasons.

Jeffrey 15:14

Yeah, that was actually part of my talk about North Korea yesterday, which was I spent a lot of time going over this idea that we traditionally have that the normal thing to do is to build a giant fat man-sized device and test it, right? Because that's what the NPT nuclear weapons states plus like India did. But there is no reason anymore to do that because everybody knows that design works, right?

So, yeah, I think it's much more common to do what, starting with the Swedes, you know, this was the original Swedish idea, was that the Swedes were going to go to a very small, and actually it was oblate-shaped implosion device, so it was really pretty fancy.

Aaron 16:05

Explain oblate to listeners who don't know much about bomb design. Shaped like a watermelon. Right. So, right, in some way. It's a more advanced design and it actually makes it smaller. I think it's better for miscibility, correct?

Jeffrey 16:23

Yeah, theirs was going to be dropped by a bomber, but it was like really pretty slim. It was only like 35 centimeters in diameter, which is something else. You know, everybody else kind of has gone with a kind of compact, say, you know, like 80, 90 centimeters in diameter sphere that maybe weighs, you know, 700, 800, maybe 1,000 kilograms.

Right. But, you know, like not only the Swedes, but the Iraqis were going to go straight to a miniaturized device. I think the North Koreans went straight to a miniaturized device. So I would love to know, and I have never seen any evidence, but I would love to know what the South Koreans were considering. But I bet they would have gotten something missile delivered.

Was that a train? No, I am sitting in Laura Rockwood's office, and Laura has a cell phone. So she's making faces at me while I do a podcast. Fair enough. And then she got a text message, which was probably like, Laura, get the loud idiot in your office to shut up.

Aaron 17:28

So, you know, we know about the 1980s violations. We know that, you know, General Park... Was using image vernacular to show off their ballistic missile capabilities around the same time. We don't know much about the bomb design. What do you think this Chosun Ilbo thing was about? What do you think South Korea's options are?

Jeffrey 17:54

First of all, Chosun Ilbo always wants South Korea to get nuclear weapons. They want South Korea to get US nuclear weapons. They want to get their own nuclear weapons. Two things that, by the way, are totally incompatible. I mean, you kind of have to pick one. We're not going to forward deploy nuclear weapons unless you, or if you plan to develop your own, like unless you are the British.

Aaron 18:15

Can we do inert training?

Jeffrey 18:18

Jesus. Yes. So, you know, I think what the Chosun Ilbo said was that South Korea could take the existing stockpile of civil plutonium Which is really pretty large. You know, South Korea has a lot of civil plutonium sitting around. Can we say the word's pyroprocessing, though? Well, so they don't have, like, a big, full pyroprocessing line. Like, they're interested in that technology.

But what they really have are, like, little hot cells and glove boxes that do... What you call post-irradiation experiments, where you fool around with one fuel rod at a time, nominally to see why they're not working. Although you could, in theory, use those to separate small amounts of plutonium. And so Chosinobo was making the argument that they could use the hot cells.

I'm a little skeptical of that, because it's really not much material, and it would take, I think, a pretty long time. But it does raise this other question, you know, a couple of years ago, and by a couple, I guess I should say like 30. GAO did this study about how a state might quickly and covertly build a reprocessing facility.

I've always found that really interesting because nobody's done it, but they certainly thought it was possible.

Aaron 19:43

One of the allegations about the Iranians, again, was that some of their hot-cell experimentations was just to prove that you could separate plutonium using it. Therefore, you preserve that option without having to go full scale on actually building reprocessing.

Jeffrey 19:57

Yeah, you know, the Taiwanese seem to have fooled around with the same thing. So, you know, the Taiwanese in the 1970s had a secret door built into their cooling pond so they could sneak individual fuel rods out. I know. That's good. Yeah, when the IAEA caught them, I think, if I'm remembering this correctly, the Taiwanese said something like, Well, yeah, okay, but our fuel rods are too big for our hot cells, and so we wouldn't be able to like, you know, chop one of them up. And so the IAEA eventually x-rayed one of the fuel rods, and apparently they had put aluminum spacers in the fuel rod so that they could cut them up outside of the hot cell, and they would have like little smaller, so they could get like, get little bits of plutonium, so Yeah, I think countries have done it, but the capacity of those things is so small.

And I think this gets to my big point, which is countries might want to screw around on the margin in order to learn things. But if you're going to build a nuclear weapon, my guess is most countries would do it right. Even the North Koreans, they tried to fool around at the edges, but once they were ready to go – You don't want to just build one nuclear weapon.

If you want to build nuclear weapons, you want to build... They're like eggs.

Aaron 21:34

True. But nobody buys just one egg. But one of the things that we know about the Iranian program is that it was highly segmented. And so at least my hypothesis is that elements who are doing mathematical modeling didn't know. Smart people probably figure it out, but it looks separate from other elements of the program. And I think that was to evade detection by U.S. intelligence services.

So if you're a clandestine proliferator, you do silly things like build a door into your cooling pond and then make fake fuel rods with aluminum spacers, or real fuel rods, but albeit with aluminum spacers so that you can muck around the edges on plutonium reprocessing.

Jeffrey 22:16

Yeah, I guess my observation would be when you're doing that stuff, You're a potential proliferator. You know, you're thinking about it. You think you might want to do it. But I suspect that when countries decide like, okay, actually we are going to do this and we're going to run the risk. They're going to do it big, which kind of gets to my – I think that's my big point about this Chosunobo story, which is that Chosunobo really wants South Korea to have nuclear weapons.

And so I think that they make all of these different arguments about getting U.S. nuclear weapons in, about building their own, about how they could do it really quickly, and that's actually an act of advocacy. And it's one thing, you know, to plan a nuclear weapons program from the editorial page of a newspaper. It's actually totally a different thing if you're really the scientists who are charged with delivering a bomb.

It kind of gets to this issue of like whether you would, for example, would want to use civil plutonium or not.

Aaron 23:16

Right. No, I think that's exactly right. And again, we don't know all of the details, but you know. It becomes a bureaucratic decision at that point. It stops being a fantasy on the op-ed pages. It becomes a bureaucratic decision. The bureaucracy has to be put in place, and then the people have to be tasked with doing it.

So it raises the larger question, and then perhaps we'll start to wrap up here. What are their options to do that? Because that would essentially mean breaking ties with the United States, going rogue, disavowing all NPT obligations, and saying, we're going to go for the moonshot here.

Jeffrey 23:58

Yeah, I think so. There was the MJ Chung, right, who's the scion of the Hyundai fortune and wants to be president, gave that speech at the Carnegie Nuclear Policy Conference where he talked about, quote unquote, temporarily withdrawing from the NPT.

Aaron 24:15

Your tweets during that conference were like a 12 out of 10.

Jeffrey 24:21

Well, I mean, it's one of those things where it sounds really easy to say, right? But if South Korea actually did it, there would be real costs. I mean, there'd be one set of costs that were diplomatic involving the United States, and we would have our own debate. I mean, there are people in the United States who think we should choose the alliance over nonproliferation if the South Koreans did that.

And so that would be a debate, but I suspect we would choose differently. But even if we did want to choose the alliance over nonproliferation, we have laws. We have laws about nonproliferation that would make it Very difficult to ignore the fact that they were building nuclear weapons. They would have to have a legislative strategy to get all kinds of exemptions jammed through the US Congress, which doesn't seem terribly likely to me.

And then on top of that, They would have all of the international problems that go with it. One thing is South Korea wants to be a big nuclear power exporter.

Aaron 25:17

In my neck of the woods, the Middle East, they're actively involved in the Emirates. They're looking at Saudi Arabia. They are looked at as a very trusted provider because they meet their goals on time and under budget.

Jeffrey 25:29

There are a lot of people who are invested in South Korea's excellent nonproliferation record or recently excellent nonproliferation record. You know, who would stand to lose a lot of money, and so I think it's really easy for MJ Chung to sort of stand up there and say this but it'd be really interesting to see what like, you know, the people who run the the, the Hyundai export businesses would turn around and say about what the, what the financial cost of the, the geopolitical environment created by a nuclear-armed South Korea would be, and like he suddenly might find himself Not quite rich enough to do all the things he likes to do.

Aaron 26:15

No, that's exactly right. It's something that I argue in my dissertation. Some of the work that Monterey does as well. Proliferation is exceedingly rare, actually. You have people muck around around the edges, but still the obstacles in front of proliferation, especially for a country like South Korea, are pretty steep. Aaron, do you know what that is?

Jeffrey 26:44

Positive no. That is a happy note. Maybe, maybe.

Aaron 26:47

That's the first time in a while. It's because we're not talking about North Korea. That's right.

Jeffrey 26:51

Okay.

Aaron 26:51

So we'll end it there. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Jeffrey, thank you for joining us. And thank Laura Rockwood for giving you her office so you can gather away for half an hour.

Jeffrey 27:03

I will. And I think now it's off to the Wiener Park. Enjoy. Bye. Bye.