US Nuclear Weapons on South Korean Soil?

Below thread from our friends at KGS Nightwatch.

South Korean National Defense Minister Kim Tae Young said today that South Korea will discuss redeploying U.S. nuclear weapons on its soil with the United States at the Extended Deterrence Policy Committee meeting in December. The context of the statement was the news that North Korea has an industrial scale and operational uranium enrichment plant of 2,000 centrifuges.

The United States does not have immediate plans to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, a Pentagon spokesman said on 22 November. The United States is consulting international partners to decide how to proceed in light of a report by a US nuclear scientist describing a small, industrial-scale uranium enrichment plant he was shown during a visit to North Korea in November, the spokesman said.

Comment: This is saber rattling. Meanwhile officials in South Korea and the US declared the weekend report about the new North Korean nuclear facilities does not create a crisis because the US and South Korea knew it all along. Japan, a bit more realistically, declared the facility an intolerable threat to security; apparently Japanese officials did not know about this all along.

There is no crisis yet. Most countries that have plutonium processes for making fissile material also have uranium enrichment processes. The original reactor at Yongbyon produced plutonium, but the North has been attempting to build a uranium enrichment cascade, with Pakistani help at one time, for over a decade. The news is that it succeeded pretty much in plain view, according to the US scientists.

There have been two schools of analytical thought about the North's weapons programs. One school holds that the weapons programs may be negotiable if the right package of incentives and sanctions may be found. The other school is that North Korea will never negotiate away its nuclear weapons because it has no other leverage over the US. To date, the hard line school is far ahead of the negotiators. Japan is more aligned with the hard line school of thought and that may be as worrisome as North Korea's antics.