Breaking Bad: South Korea's Nuclear Option
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North Korea is the impossible state. It's a place that stumped leaders and policymakers for more than three decades. It has a complex history, and it has become the United States' top national security priority. Each week on this show, we'll talk with the people who know the most about North Korea.

- Good afternoon and welcome to the Center for Strategic International Studies. I'm Andrew Schwartz, Chief Communications Officer at CSIS, and I'm very, very happy to be here today with one of my longest serving and closest colleagues, Dr. Victor Cha. Victor is known to all of you, but I'll just give you a snippet of his background. He currently is Senior Vice President for Asia and Korea Chair at CSIS. He's also a distinguished university professor and professor of government at Georgetown University.

He was appointed in 2021 by the Biden administration to serve on the Defense Policy Board and in an advisory role, which is an advisory role to the Secretary of Defense from 2004 to 2007. He, of course, served on the George W. Bush National Security Council and was responsible for Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Island nations.

Dr. Shah was also deputy U.S. deputy head of the delegation at the Six-Party Talks and received outstanding service commendations during his tenure at the NSC. He's the author of seven books. The most recent came out in 2023. It's a Korea, a history of South and North published by Yale in 2023.

Victor is also, of course, you see him on MSNBC and NBC all the time, but we're lucky to have him here at CSI. So, Victor, welcome. And I really am excited to hear about this new report and the research that went into it. Sure. Thanks. Thanks, Andrew. It's great to be here and it's great to be on the stage with you.

So there's been a lot of reports lately about the level, about high levels of support in South Korea for going nuclear. And your report, Breaking Bad, South Korea's Nuclear Option, is out today. How significant are these levels of support in South Korea about going nuclear? And is this why you conducted the study in the first place? Yeah, it is. Thanks, Andrew. It is why we conducted the study. There has been a lot of reporting lately about

of a series of public opinion polls that show that the vast majority of South Koreans are positive on the idea of possibly going nuclear in the future.

The polls that have been most cited out there cite somewhere between 70 and 76 percent. Really high. South Korean public, very high. I mean, is there anything that Americans, 70 percent of Americans agree on? I mean, not even support for the U.S. military anymore. We don't agree. 76 percent of us don't agree on just about anything. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's.

that's the case. And so this is a very high number. It gets cited all the time. It has sort of entered the Washington echo chamber and has been rattling around for a while. And so we wanted to look at this more carefully to see if this was really an accurate reflection of the state of affairs in Korea. Okay, so tell us about the study and what's different about your study compared to the others.

How'd you go about it? Sure. Happy to do that. So like I said, this number of 70 to 76%, which had become the conventional wisdom, just didn't seem right. Like it didn't seem right to us, but it was driving policy, right? I mean, the very successful state visit of the South Korean president to Washington, D.C. last April,

featured as the biggest deliverable, something called the Washington Declaration and the Nuclear Consultative Group, which were both aimed at enhancing extended deterrence commitments by the United States to South Korea. So in many ways, this polling was actually informing the policy. So what we did was we looked at it a different way. And the difference in our polling was that we didn't focus on the general public.

We focused on so-called strategic elites in South Korea. And what are strategic elites? So they are people like think tank people, professors, experts, current and former government officials, and business elite community that care about foreign policy. That's sort of the group that we sent out a survey to, to over a thousand of these sorts of folks.

And the rationale for that is that there is, you know, there is a literature, body of literature out there, scholarly literature that says public opinion matters, undeniably matters. But when it comes to decisions of national security, national security decision making, grand strategy, these decisions by governments actually better reflect

the state of thinking among strategic elites rather than the general public. Right. Right. And so that was a group that we tried to target with this particular service. So you're trying to better understand how policymakers will get their inputs and not just from the mass audience. That's right. I think that's right. I mean, I think it's fair to say that in most cases,

I mean, again, we're not trying to discount public opinion. It's very important, especially in this day and age. It's very important. Right, because you looked at public opinion as well. Yeah, we looked at public opinion too. But of all the polling that's been done, there was one that arguably looked at strategic elites, and it only polled professors in Korea. So this is the first poll that's been done in the United States of South Korean elites who

who are living in Korea, Japan, the United States, and Europe. Only South Koreans, South Korean leads, but living in all these four places to really try to get a sense of whether they thought differently than what we're seeing from the general public. And so you surveyed about 1,000 people? So we sent it out to about 1,000 people. We had about a 17% response rate.

which is, you know, it's about par when we look at the other surveys, the public opinion surveys that have been done, that seems to be about the bar for the response rate. So, but we sent it out to over a thousand people. The poll was in the field.

from January to March of this year. It was a Google Forms poll. And unlike some of the other public polling, we tried to get a little bit more in depth. So in other words, a lot of the other public opinion polling, many of them really asked just one question. Are you for it or against it? That was the only question that was asked.

We asked that question, and then based on their response, yes or no, we took them down two different questioning paths. So the whole survey, maybe some of you here and some of you online actually took it. The whole survey didn't take more than five minutes, but we were able to get into more depth than certainly what some of the other public opinion polling had been doing.

Now, the report is called Breaking Bad, South Korea's Nuclear Option, and it's up on CSIS's website as we speak. I know you want to take us through some of these poll questions and some of the results. Do you want to give us a sense of what some of the key takeaways are? Sure. I'd be happy to. So the first thing I'll say is that...

You know, we wanted to look at this public opinion poll number of 76%. So we really wanted to look at that. So the first step that we took was to basically collect

we created a data set of all the public opinion polls that had been done in South Korea on this whole question of nuclearization. We found 55 of them, right? 55 of these public opinion polls. And we basically looked at what they were saying before and after 2017, right? And the reason we picked 2017 was 2017 was North Korea's sixth and their last nuclear test,

So what was public opinion polling on this question before 2017 and what was it after 2017? And so you can see from the chart that we have here up on the screen, one of our first findings is actually important in the sense that, again, the Washington and Seoul echo chamber says 76%, but if you actually collect all the polls and you calculate the average, the average positive response

Before the sixth nuclear test was 59%. Now, 59% is not a small number, but it's not 76%. It's not 76%. And then after the 2017 North Korean nuclear test, it only goes up. The average positive response on whether Korea should go nuclear is

for the general public actually only went up two points. It went from 59% to 61%. So the first finding in terms of the public opinion polling is that there's this general citation of sort of somewhere between 70 and 76% based on two very well-known polls. But if we actually look at the entirety of the polling, the numbers for the public actually are lower. They're not insignificant.

Right. But they're definitely lower than 76 percent. So what are those polls tell you about South Koreans and how they're thinking about the nuclear equation right now? So clearly there's a lot of concern. I mean, if we get if we look at those 50, 55 polls, clearly there's a lot of concern. But I would say the uptick that we saw after 2017 is.

is actually below what I would have expected. You know, I would have expected in 2017 after six nuclear tests, no denuclearization diplomacy really since 2007, right? So over a decade.

Uncertainty about the domestic politics here in the United States. I would think uncertainty with regard to North Korea's nuclear ambitions. I would have expected because of all those things, we would see a larger increase. And when you say uncertainty about the U.S. public policy and electoral environment,

What do you mean that the United States might not support South Korea? South Koreans are questioning that? Yeah, I mean, I think that they have seen, you know, they've seen some swings in our foreign policy over the past couple of administrations. And I think they worry. They worry about the future of our domestic politics and whether we will go back to an America first policy decoupling. And they're watching what's going on in Ukraine. Yeah, and they're watching what's going on in Ukraine. They're seeing what's happening with China.

So there's a lot of things out there that worry them. But again, the number, the uptick is much lower than we would have expected. So it's not, again, it's not 76 percent. It's actually 61 percent, which is not an insignificant number. But that was sort of the first finding that was noteworthy compared to what the conventional wisdom is there.

Okay, so then moving on, the next thing is you spoke to these elites. Right. And you got a sense of where they were coming from. Tell us about that. Right. So we polled these strategic elites, as I said. We sent it to over a thousand of them. And we asked the first question we asked them was this question of whether you agree with the following statement. Should South Korea have nuclear weapons? And so as you can see, what we found is that

34% said yes, 53% said no, and 13% said I'm not sure. So in other words, 66% of strategic elites, South Korean strategic elite, did not agree with the statement South Korea should have nuclear weapons. - So parallel opposite to the public opinion poll. - Yeah, completely opposite to the public opinion poll.

which is a significant, at least I think it's a significant finding, because it's not 76% that's supported. Of elites, it's only 34%. So, you know, that's the first and main takeaway. Related to that, no, this is not the...

Related to that, we asked the question of, do you think South Korea acquiring nuclear weapons will make South Korea more secure? And so of those who supported nuclear, the minority who supported nuclearization, 95% believe that it would make more secure.

But I draw you to the second set of numbers for those who are not supportive of nuclearization. 71% said they did not believe nuclear weapons would make them more secure. So a big divide. There's a big divide here. And then the third point on this particular finding is that we asked all respondents to self-identify where they sat on the ideological spectrum.

And so I draw you to the second bar, a colored bar graph there, where for those who did not support nuclearization, they represented a broader base of the political community in South Korea. In other words, roughly one third self-identified as conservative, one third self-identified as moderate, and one third self-identified as progressive, right?

But if you look at the, so those who, those are for the people who are not supportive of nuclear. So they represented a broad base, political base in South Korea. As you can see from the first bar, for those who support nuclearization, they predominantly identify as conservative, right? So it's a much narrower political base in South Korea. And of course, as we continue discussion, that has implications for the future too. Sure.

So why do you think elites are overwhelmingly reluctant to go nuclear?

So, you know, this was an important question because, and it goes beyond other surveys, other surveys just say yes or no. But like we ask yes or no. And if you said no, we ask why. Why do you feel that way? And so what we found here when we asked the question of why, you know, if here you can see it says, since you answered no, which of the following statements best explains your answer choice?

The interesting thing here is that for, I can't read the number here, but it's 40 something percent. So 40 something percent of South Korean elites said the main reason they chose that is because of the concerns with regard to international reputation,

sanctions, prestige, being seen in the international system as a norms violator outside of the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, these sorts of things. Which was interesting because I think most people, the reflexive answer, the reflective judgment would have been damage to the alliance. If South Korea goes nuclear, it'll damage to the alliance.

That was not unimportant. As you see, it was ranked second. But the first one, the first main consideration among South Korean elites was this point about international prestige, international norms and sanctions. And then secondly, concerns about the U.S. alliance. And then you can see the third and the fourth choice had to do with inciting an arms race on the Korean Peninsula and then concerns about security dilemmas, insecurity spirals,

with China and Russia. Again, those things were secondary to the main concern, which was the effect on South Korea's prestige and status in the international system. Yeah, I want to get into that a little bit. So why is it so important for South Korean elites

to be inside the norms and really not in violation of the NPT treaty on the side of the good guys, if you will. - Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's because of how hard they worked to achieve this status. They were a country, people don't really remember this, but as early as 1990, they weren't even in the UN. They didn't even have a seat in the UN. They had observer status along with North Korea in the UN.

So they worked very hard to achieve that, a seat in the United Nations to achieve OECD status as an advanced industrialized democracy. During the Obama administration, they were one of the four conveners of the nuclear security summits that Obama convened. They've been a stand-up member of the Nonproliferation Treaty. The U.S.,

South Korea 1, 2, 3 civilian nuclear energy agreement sort of meets gold standards in terms of proliferation safeguards. So I think elites at least really appreciate and understand the role that South Korea plays on the international stage.

And the thought that they could then be grouped with North Korea as a violator of these international norms and standards, I think was just unacceptable for many of these folks. And South Korea has worked very hard to establish itself as a great place to do business globally. Yes. So I would think that elites would be concerned about that as well. No, I think that's right. I think that's right, too, because

the concern based on their responses is that this would not only be a loss of prestige, but it would affect sanctions behavior. I mean, just look at all the sanctions that are on North Korea today. So it would certainly affect sanctions behavior with regards to South Korea. And of course, that has economic implications. So I think there are many

possible reasons that were sort of built into this answer. And people could have had different things in their mind when they chose this. But what is most important is that many of them, or 40 something percent, right, chose this as the main consideration for why they didn't agree with the statement that South Korea should have nuclear weapons. You know, it's hard to play the game of what if in Washington, except for we play the game of what if in Washington all the time. All the time, yeah. Right?

If you're in your former job on the National Security Council and South Korea is giving indications that it is going to pursue nuclear weapons, what's your response?

So, frankly, I don't think it would be that different from what the administration itself has tried to do, right? Which has been to do whatever they can to reassure South Korea, to strengthen extended deterrence instruments and mechanisms, right? The Washington Declaration that came out of the April 2023 visit, the Nuclear Consultative Group,

you know, improving communications on intelligence sharing, early warning. These were actually all things that we recommended in a CSIS report that we did a couple of years ago on the question of extended deterrence. I mean, I think these sorts of things. But the other would be, and I hope our administration hears this, is that

don't listen so much to the Washington echo chamber or the Seoul echo chamber, right? There are a couple of polls that got out there and then everybody started reporting on them. Everybody started citing this number and it was just accepted as given, right? And so I guess one of the things I would have done is I would have tasked CSIS, hey, look at this number more carefully and see if there's anything real to it. Because I think as this report shows,

The public opinion number is actually greatly inflated. It's lower than that. And when you look at strategic elites who actually, you know, they matter the most in terms of foreign policy and national security decisions. When you look at that group, it's a very different picture, a very different picture. OK, so let's talk about that.

Why do you think there's such a difference between elite and public views in South Korea on nuclear weapons? So a couple of the reasons we already mentioned, which is I think that they generally have a, they value more deeply the international status and prestige that South Korea has acquired.

on both nonproliferation, but more generally in the international system. So I think that's one reason. But the other, I think, is that they also in general understand extended deterrence a lot better than the public.

So, they see things that came out of the 2023 summit, like the Washington Declaration, the NCG, port calls by US nuclear submarines, the movement of rotation of strategic assets in and around the peninsula. I think they understand and appreciate those sorts of things better than the general public.

I think they also have a better understanding of conventional deterrence. I mean, the North Korean leader, after Putin's threats to NATO or first nuclear use, the North Korean leader did the same thing, repeated those sorts of first nuclear use threats. But I think and that might scare the public. But I think elites understand the strength of the U.S.-Korea alliance and conventional deterrence and also how...

how the United States and South Korea would respond if there were any use of nuclear weapons on the peninsula. So I think that that's another reason that they felt that way. As I said, they care about the reputational costs.

But again, I also think our polling was important because we tried to take a deeper dive, scratch beneath the surface. And who knows, if public opinion polling had scratched beneath the surface like we did, they might have come up with a different answer as well. So do you think that South Korean policymakers have some work to do with the public on this issue?

Yeah, I think they do. I think they do. For one, you know, and they admit this, they need to do a better job of communicating to the public what has been accomplished in the last two years, you know, between you and Biden on this particular issue. I think they sort of feel that. And, you know, I'm not trying to belittle public opinion, but, you know,

Understanding deterrence is very counterintuitive. So just to tell a quick story, I remember many, many years ago, I participated in a meeting that was, this is when I was out at Stanford, that Bill Perry held, I think it was a World Affairs Council event at Palo Alto High School. And the idea was actually to try to introduce the public to the concept of missile defense.

right? The notion of missile defense. And for the public, they generally understood it to be like this shield, like Star Wars, where you could zap things out of the sky and that enemies couldn't hit us with missiles. And this one person who was a perfectly normal middle-aged person, probably not

deeply embedded in foreign affairs, but someone who is an educated reader, she raised her hand and she was like, I thought we had that already. Like during the Cold War, I thought we had that already. That's why the Soviets never hit us, right? So, you know, it's a, which of course is,

Not true, because we didn't have missile defense, but it was because of deterrence, nuclear deterrence. The notion that mutual vulnerability created stability. So I think some of this is counterintuitive, and it's hard to understand. They just see North Korea building all these missiles and nuclear weapons, and they think, oh, they're going to hit us at any time now. But of course, elites understand that. Elites understand deterrence. So that's another reason why.

Okay, so is the resistance among elites permanent? This constituency has a broad political base, so could it change in the future? Yeah, so this is a very important question because we didn't only want to ask people how they felt today, but we wanted to ask them if things change in the future, how you would feel, right? So we asked the question of if an America First policy returns to the White House, would

that denigrates allies and that seeks retrenchment from Korea, from the alliance with Korea, would your support change? And so as you would expect for those who support nuclearization, who answered yes to the first question, of course they said that their support for going nuclear would increase dramatically, right? It would go up dramatically. But what was interesting is that we asked for those who are not supportive of going, who said no to the first question,

would your opinions change if the US were to decouple or to pull out troops or something like that from Korea? And here, over 51% of those who opposed nuclearization said they would change their mind. Is that right? Yeah. So over 51%. There was still a substantial group that said they wouldn't change their mind, but over 51% said they would change their mind. In addition to that,

In our very first question, there was a group of 13% who said they were uncertain or did not know. So completely, genuinely undecided. Of that group, that 13%, something like what, 90 something? Oh, 83% of them said that they would change their minds too. So the point of all this is to say is that this strong belief

bipartisan broad base of South Korean elites who are not supportive of nuclearization would change their... That sort of support is not unconditional. Interesting. It's not a gift to the United States. Everything changes everything. It's not unconditional. And if the United States were to talk about a

decoupling or removing troops or making a deal with Kim Jong-un on just nuclear weapons and long range ballistic missiles, but not the short range ones that target Korea, that would be the definition of decoupling. Then this broad based group, politically based group that are not supportive of nuclearization, over half of them would change their view.

Would they change? I mean, at the end of the Trump administration, there was a lot of talk about charging North Korea more, South Korea more for U.S. defense services and U.S. defense capabilities and really just being the ally that we are to South Korea. Does that play into this as well? I mean, that could play into it. I mean, I think.

I think for the public, it may play into it as a form of decoupling. I think for elites, they would understand. I mean, we didn't pull this, but my sense is elites would understand the difference between U.S. demands for more burden sharing versus, as I said earlier, like making a deal with Kim Jong-un.

and saying, no more nuclear tests, no more ICBM tests, we're done. And meanwhile, they're still doing stuff in the DMZ, they're doing stuff in the waters off the coast of Korea, they're building

a whole new generation of sort of cruise missiles with nuclear capability, like all these other sorts of things that matter for South Korea and Japan, that would be, to me, I think that would be a bigger signal from elites that the U.S. is decoupling. I understand you have some other interesting findings. Do you want to take us to them? Sure, sure. I'd be happy to. So the other point about this one that I want to...

mention is that the other thing I think that this finding shows us is that, again, contrary to public opinion, the majority of elites whose opinions matter and views matter on national security and foreign policy are pretty much, from a U.S. nonproliferation perspective, are pretty much in a good space. But I think what this polling shows us is that

it could shift dramatically. And it could shift very quickly. And I say that not just because 51% of those who opposed nuclearization would then support it, but if you think about it, it's that 51% plus the ones who are already supportive of it, right? And then you already have a general public that is supportive of it, right? So if you're a political leader and you see elite opinion shift in this direction and the public is already in this space,

This is my point. Things could change. And you have real alignment. Yeah. Yeah. Then you have real alignment. It's hard to book that trend. That's right. That's right. So I think, you know, that's one concern is that, you know, I think things are in a good space right now. You've got to give the administration your credit for what they've done to bolster deterrence.

But if the pendulum swings, it could swing very quickly. And that's the first point. Some of the other findings-- let me offer you some of the other findings. So-- take a look at this again. Oh, right. So for those who supported nuclearization, we asked them the question, fine, you support nuclearization. How should South Korea go nuclear? How should they go nuclear?

And we asked them to rank preferences. And so what became clear from this particular answer is that for those who want nuclearization, their number one choice is an autonomous nuclear capability. We gave them three choices, autonomous capabilities, nuclear sharing with the United States, some arrangement of nuclearization.

conventional precision strike capabilities for South Korea with US warheads. Although we didn't get into that specificity, we just said nuclear sharing. And then the third was returning tactical nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula. During the Cold War, the United States deployed a large number of tactical nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula. George H.W. Bush pulled them all off.

During this period, even though we had those weapons there, the United States officially was neither confirm nor deny POS, but everybody knew they were there. So we gave them those three choices and for those who were supportive of nuclearization, their preference clearly was for the number one option, which was an autonomous nuclear capability.

The other finding, and again, these are all in the report, and some of that might be hard to read. As we asked the same question about how should South Korea go nuclear for those who didn't support nuclearization,

And so of course, for those who didn't support nuclearization, they're like, I said, I don't support it. So why are you asking me how South Korea should go nuclear? And we just said, if pressed, like if you had to do this,

What would be your preference? Giving them the same three choices, autonomous capabilities, nuclear sharing, returning tactical nuclear weapons to the peninsula. And so for those non-nuclear advocates, they said if pressed, OK, their number one choice would not be autonomous capabilities. It would be nuclear sharing.

it'd be nuclear sharing. And so that's significant, I think, in two respects. The first is that if we ever got to this point where the pendulum swung, there would be a big debate in Korea about how to do it, with some saying autonomous capabilities and some saying, no, let's do sharing within the alliance. The other interesting finding, I think, from this particular question was

Again, the public opinion polls have sparked a great deal of discussion at think tanks, conferences, and other places about things like returning tactical nuclear weapons. Should the US return tactical? You hear it all the time, right? But one of the things that was interesting about this survey is that of our respondents,

Very few chose that as their first choice. The conversation is not about returning tactical nuclear weapons. It's actually about the first two, either autonomous or nuclear sharing capability. Oh, let's see if there's anything else. Oh, I don't have the slides for this, but the other thing is that...

When we asked those who were supportive and not supportive of nuclearization, one of the things we asked them about was, what was the threat that this was directed against?

And in both cases, the highest response was the North Korean nuclear threat. Sure. It wasn't China. It wasn't Russia. It wasn't Japan. It was the immediate threat. And that's a significant finding also because it suggests that if this North Korean nuclear problem is somehow neutralized or solved,

then South Korea would not see a need for nuclear weapons. Interesting. I mean, so it suggests that because we didn't expect this result, but because we expected nuclear weapons are a hedge against China. Maybe they're a hedge against Russia. I mean, given the state of things with Russia.

And of course, you can never discount South Korean concerns about Japan. But that was actually not what we found. We found in the case that everybody was really focused on the North Korean nuclear threat. Again, which suggests it doesn't confirm, but it suggests that if that threat were somehow taken care of, then there wouldn't be this sort of groundswell of need for nuclear weapons.

So those were kind of some of the other findings. But then people can, if they read the report, they can sort of see some of the other results. Absolutely. So we're going to go to some of your audience questions in just a minute. So please have them ready. The final question I really want to ask you is, what are the policy implications of this report? Yeah.

So I think there are a few and we try to cover them at the end of the report. The first is for the US government, for the United States, we don't have to press the panic button, right? Like we don't have to pull the emergency brake just yet because this notion that South Korea is on the precipice of going nuclear is at least according to our thing is just wrong. It's just not right.

the vast majority of South Korean elites don't feel that way about it. So for all of our friends who've been working on this issue, what they're doing is working, right? The Washington Declaration, the NCG,

integrating early warning, all of these things. I know a lot of these guys and they're working so hard and they're like the South Koreans are never, like whatever we talk about, they're not happy. It's working, right? At least for strategic elites, it's working. It's answering the mail for now.

Second, however, reassurance is important. Reassurance is a part of deterrence. Continued reassurance is necessary. Allies

will never feel fully secure with an extended nuclear deterrence commitment. They just won't. That's just the name of the game. As De Gaulle said famously, he doubted the United States would trade Paris for New York. So I'm sure Koreans are always worried, are they going to trade Washington for Seoul or San Francisco for Seoul? Those sorts of insecurities are always there.

So the United States has to continue to reassure. It may feel like a bottomless pit, but at least what our study shows is that it yields results, right? Elites in Korea don't, despite the fact that what is happening in Ukraine, the absence of any diplomacy with North Korea, the fact that they are building weapons like crazy. China's assert, despite all these things. China's military buildup is massive.

well reported at this point. Yeah. Despite all these things, they're still not desiring nuclear weapons. So I think that's important for people to understand. It may feel like a bottomless pit, but there are actually results that show for this. Third, I think it's very important for the United States to avoid the language of decoupling and retrenchment. I mean,

Words matter like words are policy, especially if they're stated at the very highest levels Yeah, and so if you know Current or future presidents start saying things like that. It's going to have effects. There will be ramifications Those are you can't just say oh he's just saying it but he doesn't mean it right or she's just saying it but she doesn't mean it there are real ramifications that come from this and

And in the case of South Korea, these are not good ramifications for the United States. If the pendulum starts to swing, that's not something that's in U.S. interests. The fourth is, as I said, our surveys show that 13%

of South Korean strategic elites didn't offer an opinion on this. They're undecided. And so when we think about the domestic debate in Korea about nuclearization, 13%, 13 points is a lot. It's not insignificant.

So whatever the United States says and does, it needs to keep in mind and keep account of that 13%. It has to remember there is a 13% swing vote, if you will, out there on nuclearization in South Korea that matters. That could go one way or the other.

And so continuing to support and amplify voices for nonproliferation in South Korea is something that should continue to be done. And then finally,

we make a point about how, and it's not just the United States decision, but how the United States should continue to support a non-proliferation role for South Korea in the global order. As I said, South Korea was one of the four hosts of the first generation of nuclear safety and security summits that the Obama administration did. They, the

The U.S. and others could support South Korea to have an executive role in organizations like the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency. They could support Korea to have an executive role in things like PSI, the Proliferation Security Initiative, and in general also be sort of...

model or a paragon for nonproliferation safety in civil nuclear arrangements. I know that there's a dispute between the United States and South Korea in this particular respect on civil nuclear. That dispute is a dispute in and of itself, but more broadly promote and support South Korea's role as

a leader in sort of nonproliferation and safeguards when it comes to civilian nuclear energy. So, you know, there are other things they could do as well, but these are just a short list of things that come out of this in terms of policy.

Terrific. I want to thank Dr. Cha for this terrific presentation. It will be up on CSIS.org, both the presentation and this event itself. So with your applause, please thank Dr. Cha. If you have a question for one of our experts about the impossible state, email us at impossiblestate at CSIS.org.

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