What South Korea Can Learn from South Asia’s Nuclear Experience

[mota bhai 2,675]

Those calling for South Korea to go nuclear should look at the India-Pakistan experience.

India and Pakistan are again at loggerheads, with five Indian soldiers and two Pakistani soldiers were killed on the Line of Control (LOC) in the disputed Kashmir region earlier this month ... Earlier, in January, India had accused Pakistani Special Forces of killing two Indian soldiers, claiming one of them was beheaded ... New Delhi remains unable to influence Islamabad’s policy on state-sponsored terrorism, despite the presence of nuclear arsenals in South Asia since the 1990s.

Something similar is visible on the Korean Peninsula. North Korean provocations have persisted since its first nuclear weapon test in 2006. Seoul, like New Delhi, has vacillated between diplomacy and military threats to no avail. South Korea’s current state of strategic frustration has convinced some leaders in Seoul that their country needs an indigenous nuclear capability ... At a conference earlier this year in Washington, DC [former Saenuri Party chairman and presidential candidate] Chung leaned heavily on the U.S.-Soviet model: “The only thing that kept the Cold War cold was the mutual deterrence afforded by nuclear weapons…The lesson of the Cold War is that against nuclear weapons, only nuclear weapons can hold the peace.”

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The experience of new nuclear weapon states in South Asia, however, suggests that South Korean nuclear weapons will not prove tremendously helpful to this end.

India and Pakistan have fought four major wars since independence, including hostilities even after openly attaining nuclear weapons in 1998. The Line of Control in Kashmir remains tense to this day with Pakistan-based terrorists operating in Indian-administered Kashmir for more than two decades. Pakistan’s revisionist motives in Kashmir and the deep-seated ideological divide between the two nations form the edifice of today’s India-Pakistan rivalry.

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Pakistan has historically been a garrison state: if all states have armies, Pakistan’s army has a state. Pakistani politics is dominated by the military, which derives legitimacy from its opposition to India. Second, Pakistan has been a conventionally weaker state vis-à-vis India’s military. Pakistan tried to initially offset this vulnerability by incorporating the element of risk and the cult of the offensive in its military doctrine. The major modern conflicts in South Asia were initiated by Pakistan. However, after a comprehensive defeat in 1971, Pakistan’s conventional inferiority prompted it to pursue nuclear weapons as well as sub-conventional warfare against India. Since 1989, Pakistan has supported insurgency in Kashmir and also other non-state actors in the region.

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Pakistan ... can only wage sub-conventional warfare against India’s vast military resources as long as the risk of nuclear escalation looms over the region. India, therefore, typically eschews larger-scale military options against Islamabad due to the fear of nuclear escalation. The instability-instability paradox was evident in several exchanges between India and Pakistan. A year after both sides tested nuclear devices, Pakistani troops in the garb of local insurgents occupied a large swath of Indian Territory in Kargil. New Delhi’s military response to wrestle back control was significantly more reserved than similar operations in 1965, due in large part to the threat of nuclear use by Pakistan ... The presence of nuclear weapons in South Asia has not eliminated the risk of provocations and conflict. Nuclear proliferation optimists should expect no different if both sides of the 38th parallel go nuclear.

The limitations of applying Cold War nuclear logic to the Koreas are now apparent. South Korea’s security concerns and grievances against North Korea are serious, but a ROK nuclear arsenal would be unlikely to prevent future sub-conventional provocations and will face the same challenges present in South Asia’s uneasy peace.

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The DPRK depends on instability at the nuclear level to achieve its national ambitions. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared “we are no longer in a period of cyclical provocations [with North Korea] – where a provocation occurs and then there is a period of time when concessions are made…I think we are in a period of prolonged provocations.” North Korean leaders cultivate an image of irrational decision-making to convince the world that they have the will to move up the escalatory ladder to full-scale conventional or possibly even nuclear war.

Regular provocations are central to North Korea’s deterrent strategy. As U.S. Navy (Ret.) Rear Admiral Michael McDevitt explained, provocations “reinforce the credibility of North Korea’s conventional deterrent by demonstrating a political willingness to risk war.”

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The South Asian case is well suited for the Korean Peninsula. First, both South Asia and the Koreas represent a conflict dyad where one state is a status-quo power (India, South Korea) and the other revisionist (Pakistan, North Korea). If Pakistan wants to assimilate Kashmir from a rather satisfied India, North Korean goals have ranged from uniting the peninsula under its leadership to reversing South Korea’s dominance in the region. Second, both Pakistan and North Korea have dovetailed brinksmanship into their respective conventional and nuclear strategies. On the other hand, India and South Korea practice strategic restraint in dealing with their neighbors. Third, conflicting states have divergent identities in both cases. If Pakistan professes to be a Muslim state vis-à-vis the secular but Hindu-majority India, North Korea prides itself on its Junche/communist identity against the liberal democratic South Korea. Fourth, compared to India and South Korea, decision-making in both Pakistan and North Korea is concentrated in fewer hands, which derive much of their legitimacy from opposition to an outside force (Pakistan-India, DPRK-ROK/U.S.). Lastly, both Pakistan and North Korea are weaker states in terms of conventional firepower.

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Therefore, the South Asian conflict dyad portends a grim future for a possible nuclear South Korea since provocations would likely continue.

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The experience of India ... demonstrates that Seoul should not expect for DPRK provocations to radically diminish simply because nuclear bombs in the region have South Korean flags painted on the side.

http://thediplomat.com/2013/08/29/what-south-korea-can-learn-from-south-asias-nuclear-experience/?all=true