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Park Chan-kyong

South Korea’s pursuit of US approval to reprocess spent nuclear fuel is gaining traction, in a move experts say could set the stage for potential nuclear armament.
Ambassador Cho Hyun-dong, Seoul’s top envoy to Washington, raised eyebrows last week when he said his country would persuade the United States to allow South Korea to build and operate facilities to reprocess spent nuclear fuel.
“We will regard that as a priority that we will push for after a new US government takes office,” Cho said.
The proposed operations can produce fuel for nuclear power plants and nuclear-powered submarines. But the fuel can also be used potentially to build nuclear weapons in South Korea by extracting fissile material, according to analysts.
To secure reprocessing facilities, South Korea needs to revise a 1976 nuclear energy cooperation pact with Washington, under which Seoul is barred from gaining access to such facilities due to proliferation concerns.
The ambassador, however, stressed that Seoul would stick to its current stance against seeking any nuclear option for national security.
During a White House summit in April last year, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and his American counterpart Joe Biden adopted the Washington Declaration to strengthen the US’s “extended deterrence” commitment to using the full range of its military capabilities, including nuclear weapons, to defend its ally.

Consequently, a bilateral nuclear deterrence dialogue known as the Nuclear Consultative Group (NCG) was launched to help alleviate Seoul’s security concerns.
“The purpose of the government striving to concretely and institutionally strengthen extended deterrence through the Washington Declaration is to craft the best measure to respond to North Korean threats without South Korea going as far as to have its own nuclear arms and bring in tactical nuclear arms,” Yoon said then.
“That is the current administration’s position.”
At a press briefing for foreign correspondents on Tuesday, Cheong Seong-chang, a senior researcher from the Sejong Institute, said once South Korea secured nuclear latency – capabilities and facilities required to reprocess nuclear-spent fuel – it would be able to produce nuclear weapons “in three to six months”.
“If South Korea has nuclear latency as Japan does, it would serve as a strong deterrence against North Korea, which resorts to nuclear threats so often”, Cheong told journalists.
“But for nuclear warheads, South Korea has all the things needed to arm itself with its own nuclear weapons – delivery means, engineering and the [newly launched] strategic command,” he said.
Ambassador Cho’s remarks came as a growing number of experts and politicians advocate nuclear latency to ensure that South Korea would be able to arm itself with nuclear weapons quickly with relatively low costs when necessary.

Defence Minister Kim Yong-ho in August reaffirmed Seoul’s basic stance that its defence against the nuclear-armed North Korea was based on the US nuclear umbrella and extended deterrence.
“However, if it is deemed difficult to deal with the North Korean nuclear threats, all other options are open”, he said.
In May 2020, when Kim was a visiting professor at Soongsil University, he wrote: “We cannot survive without nuclear weapons. If we are nuclear-armed, we can neutralise our neighbours’ nuclear weapons through the ‘balance of fear’.”
Han Dong-hoon, head of the ruling conservative People Power Party, said in June that South Korea needed nuclear latency as relying solely on alliances for security had its limits given the unpredictable international environment.
“I think [having nuclear latency] is a practical option because if we openly arm ourselves with nuclear weapons, we would risk international sanctions,” he said.
A group of some 20 politicians launched a National Assembly initiative known as Mugunghwa Forum adopting the name of the country’s national flower, mugunghwa or rose of Sharon, to rally support for the country’s acquisition of nuclear latency.
Kim Jee-yong, an international relations professor at South Korea’s Naval Academy, said at the same Tuesday briefing that Washington’s defence commitment to Seoul would face serious challenges in 2027 in the event of Beijing’s invasion of Taiwan if warnings by US officials were true.

“In that case, the NCG would hardly work as the United States cannot afford to wage two simultaneous crises – one in Taiwan Strait and the other on the Korean peninsula”, he said on Tuesday.
“The war in the Taiwan Strait would provide the North with a golden opportunity to turn the South into a hostage to nuclear blackmails”, he said.
Beijing views Taiwan as a renegade province that should be reintegrated into mainland control, by force if necessary. While many nations, including the US, do not officially acknowledge Taiwan as an independent state, they oppose any use of force to alter the status quo.
Analysts advocating for nuclear armament point to South Korea’s notoriously low birth rate, which makes it impossible for the country to maintain its current number of soldiers.
Another key reason for attaining reprocessing capability, according to analysts, is to ensure a stable fuel supply for South Korea’s 26 nuclear power plants, which account for about 30 per cent of the country’s power supply.
South Korea relies significantly on Russia for nuclear fuel but their ties have deteriorated due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Moscow’s deepening military alliance with North Korea.
Between 2019 and 2023, South Korea imported 1,947 tonnes of enriched uranium for nuclear fuel, with 36 per cent from France, 34 per cent from Russia and 25 per cent from the UK.


Washington remains strongly opposed to South Korea developing its nuclear weapons because of proliferation concerns.
Vipin Narang, then US acting assistant secretary of defence, warned in July that South Korea would become an “international pariah” and likely face global sanctions if it were to produce nuclear weapons.
Political science professor Yang Moo-jin, head of the University of North Korean Studies, said Seoul felt discriminated against by Washington, which applied a “double standard” – allowing Japan to reprocess spent fuel but not South Korea.
“South Korea needs facilities to treat spent fuel as its storage facilities for high-level radioactive waste is getting saturated fast. Its efforts to acquire a reprocessing facility have nothing to do with weapons development,” Yang said.
Yang Uk, a military strategy specialist from the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, however, said nuclear latency advocacy would only deepen Washington’s suspicion over Seoul’s ultimate purpose.
“The more [Seoul is] openly advocating for nuclear latency, the less likely Washington would accept it. This is a dilemma”, Yang Uk told This Week in Asia.


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Seoul’s envoy to Washington, Cho Hyun-dong, has urged the US to allow South Korea to run reprocessing facilities for spent nuclear fuel


Seoul’s envoy to Washington, Cho Hyun-dong, has urged the US to allow South Korea to run reprocessing facilities for spent nuclear fuel.
