South Korea, 1968–1980

Abstract

The chapter analyzes South Korea’s aborted efforts to acquire nuclear weapons in the 1970s. It shows that South Korea inferred the strength of its security guarantees on the basis of American forward deployed conventional forces in its region. Yet this chapter also scrutinises the conventional wisdom that the United States successfully applied considerable pressure on South Korea to extract non-proliferation commitments. Although the United States did apply non-military levers of coercion against South Korea, whether the significant use of these levers was definitive in curbing South Korea’s nuclear weapons interest remains unclear.