South Korea Is the Junior Partner in the North Korean Crisis

Doug Bandow

Security, Asia

Seoul should use the current crisis as the opportunity to take charge of its future.

North Korea has been dominating international headlines. Journalists have breathlessly reported on the possibility of nuclear war. Death and destruction appear to be just one missile launch away.

And it’s been all about America.

Yet the country that should be most concerned about events in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is South Korea. The peninsula was divided seventy-two years ago, after Japan’s surrender in World War II. Mass refugee flows left numerous families separated at the end of the Korean War in 1953. Reunification remains the formal objective of Seoul. Many residents of the South view those in the DPRK as long lost, if slightly misguided, brothers and sisters.

Moreover, before developing ICBMs Pyongyang was only able to threaten the Republic of Korea (ROK). By stationing troops on the peninsula and in nearby nations, Washington provided North Korea with convenient targets. But South Korea was uniquely vulnerable. The North’s forces were spring-loaded forward, ready to roll south. If war erupted, the ROK, not America, would be the battlefield.

The South also suffered disproportionately over the years when the Korean cold war occasionally turned hot. American military personnel occasionally died, and the USS Pueblo was seized in 1968, but the ROK suffered actual attack. For instance, in 2010 the North sank a South Korean corvette and bombarded a South Korean island, killing sailors and civilians. Over the years the DPRK is thought to have abducted South Koreans, as well as Japanese citizens, and held many of the ROK fishermen it detained over the years.

Today Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons most threatens the South. North Korea’s arsenal is filled with short-range missiles capable of carrying chemical and biological weapons and presumably any nukes that have been miniaturized. The threat is real, not potential. Abundant artillery also threatens Seoul, the South’s political, industrial and population heart. The DPRK just might be able to make good on its threat to turn South Korea’s capital into a “lake of fire.”

Read full article