This is the most explicit announcement so far from Seoul that it’s actively considering nuclear weapons, although the disclosure is also very likely calculated to pressure the United States into giving Seoul a role in nuclear war planning on the peninsula, and perhaps also to redeploy U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea, the last of these having being withdrawn in 1991.If that’s the case, we can have our own nuclear weapons pretty quickly, given our scientific and technological capabilities.” Yoon also made it clear that Pyongyang’s expanding nuclear arsenal is a threat not only to the South but also to the United States and other allies.Under a separate joint declaration with North Korea dating from 1991, Seoul and Pyongyang agreed not to “test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons.” However, the fact that North Korea has broken that agreement, with six nuclear tests since 2006, means that a precedent has at least been set on the peninsula and Seoul may seek to follow suit, especially after the abject failure of negotiations to stop or even significantly slow down Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.At the same time, surveys seem to show that a majority of the South Korean people would support either the United States redeploying nuclear weapons to the South or the building of a domestically produced nuclear arsenal.In its 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, for example, the Pentagon describes the “deterrence dilemmas” presented by North Korea while highlighting the risk of a wider Asia-Pacific conflict if nuclear weapons were to be used."