South Korea Demands More Active Role in Nuclear Weapons Management from Biden Administration

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said on Monday he has asked the Biden administration for a move active role in managing nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula, in part because the South Korean public is growing increasingly uneasy over North Korean aggression.

“While the nuclear weapons belong to the US, intel sharing, planning, and training should be done jointly,” Yoon said in a Monday interview with South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo.

Yoon said the U.S. response to his request for “joint planning and joint exercise” of nuclear forces was “quite positive.” 

The U.S. embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Monday, but the SCMP noted the U.S. and South Korea agreed to closer strategic cooperation and information-sharing in September, during their first bilateral meeting on nuclear deterrence in almost four years.

Chosun Ilbo quoted Japanese media reports that South Korea and Japan, whose relationship has been somewhat strained in recent years, are “considering sharing radar information that detects and tracks North Korean missiles through the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.”

North Korea staged its latest provocations over the weekend, launching three short-range ballistic missiles into the East Sea on Sunday, followed by a fourth on Sunday.

Yoon responded to the launches by instructing his military to respond “with a firm determination not to avoid going to war,” a somewhat complicated way of telling them not to be intimidated by North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. 

The South Korean Defense Ministry announced on Monday it has created a new directorate under its Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to handle North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction. The Defense Ministry warned that the Communist regime in Pyongyang will “face an end” if it uses nuclear weapons.

North Korean state media on Sunday described a more-unhinged-than-usual address by North Korean tyrant Kim Jong-un to his Workers Party leadership last week, in which he claimed South Korea is “hell-bent on an imprudent and dangerous arms build-up.”

Kim, therefore, demanded his military begin mass-producing nuclear warheads and missile delivery systems to implement “an exponential increase of the country’s nuclear arsenal.”

“We have declared our resolute will to respond with nuke for nuke, and an all-out confrontation for an all-out confrontation,” the dictator railed.

“Our nuclear force considers it as the first mission to deter war and safeguard peace and stability and, however, if it fails to deter, it will carry out the second mission, which will not be for defense,” he said.

Kim made these remarks while overseeing what Chosun Ilbo described as a “bizarre ceremony” in which his party bestowed its blessings upon “super-large multiple rocket launchers capable of carrying nuclear weapons,” as Kim described them. 

Chosun Ilbo said the launchers were indeed large, and could be capable of hitting “any target in South Korea.”

Kim ordered the development of a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) whose “main mission” would be “a quick nuclear counter-strike,” implicitly against the United States, and he vowed to launch North Korea’s first military satellite “at the earliest date possible.”

Sunday’s bulletin from North Korea’s state KCNA news agency also included the disturbing news that the highest-ranking military official in the Communist regime, Central Military Commission vice chairman Pak Jong-chon, was sacked without warning or explanation. The chairman of the all-powerful Central Military Commission is Kim Jong-un himself.

Reuters noted that Pak might not be dead, but he is being very quickly erased:

No reason for the change was given. Pyongyang regularly revamps its leadership and the year-end party gathering has often been used to announce personnel reshuffles and major policy decisions.

State television showed Pak sitting in the front row of the podium with his head down during the meeting while other members raised their hands to vote on personnel issues. His seat was later shown unoccupied.

He was also absent in photos released on Monday by the official KCNA news agency of Kim’s New Year’s Day visit to the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun which houses the bodies of his grandfather and father, unlike in October when Pak accompanied Kim on a trip to the palace to mark a party anniversary.

Pak was a onetime rising star who went from artillery commander to four-star general and Politburo member in just five years, then suffered a modest setback in 2021 when Kim harangued and demoted many of his top officials for handling the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic poorly. His sudden dismissal is interesting because Kim has lately been congratulating his military on doing a stellar job of developing new weapons to meet his demands.

Seoul-based analyst Oh Gyong-sup of the Korea Institute for National Unification told Reuters that Pak might have been embarrassed and kicked out during last week’s alarming saga of North Korean drones flying into South Korean airspace with seeming impunity. 

South Korea responded by sending three of their drones into North Korea without provoking a response, which turned a moment of triumph for Pyongyang into an embarrassment, so Oh thought Pak might have taken the fall.

Pak was replaced by Ri Yong-gil, also a general and a high-ranking member of the Central Military Commission. Ri is noted for his willingness to implement extremely belligerent orders from Kim. He survived a bit of political turbulence in 2016 when he missed a few high-profile meetings, and South Korean intelligence thought he might have been executed for corruption. Kim was on a rampage of brutal purges at the time, but in the end Ri evidently survived, and was even awarded some new titles.