APPROVAL RAISES QUESTIONS
Lee’s predecessors had wished to construct nuclear-powered submarines, however the US had opposed this concept for many years.
Daryl Kimball, govt director of the Washington-based Arms Management Affiliation, mentioned the difficulty of South Korea buying such submarines “raises all kinds of questions.”
“As with the AUKUS deal, (South Korea) might be on the lookout for nuclear propulsion companies appropriate for subs, together with the gas, from the US,” he mentioned.
Kimball mentioned such submarines normally concerned using highly-enriched uranium and would “require a really advanced new regime of safeguards” by the Worldwide Atomic Power Company, which has a key function in implementing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
“It stays technically and militarily pointless for South Korea to accumulate the know-how to extract weapons-usable plutonium from spent gas or to accumulate uranium enrichment capabilities, which may also be used to supply nuclear weapons,” he mentioned.
“If the USA seeks to forestall the proliferation of nuclear weapons worldwide, the Trump administration ought to resist such overtures from allies as strongly as it really works to disclaim adversary entry to those dual-use applied sciences.”
Jenny City, who heads 38 North, a Korea-focused analysis group in Washington, mentioned it was inevitable that South Korean calls for for US cooperation on nuclear points would develop, given current allegations about Russian technical cooperation to assist nuclear-armed North Korea make progress in the direction of buying nuclear-powered submarines.
Kim Dong-yup, a North Korea research professor at Kyungnam College, mentioned the Lee-Trump summit had formalised a “transaction scheme of safety ensures and financial contributions” for sustaining the prolonged deterrence and alliance in change for South Korea’s elevated defence spending and nuclear-powered subs and US investments.
“In the long run, this South Korea-US summit might be summarised in a single phrase: the commercialisation of the alliance and the commodification of peace,” he mentioned. “The issue is that the steadiness of that deal was to maximise American pursuits moderately than the autonomy of the Korean Peninsula.”
