Since Yoon Seok-yue came to power, South Korea can be said to have "one-sidedly" fallen to the United States. As early as last May, in his inaugural speech, Yoon Seok-yue bluntly stated that "we should not pursue a fragile peace that temporarily avoids war" and "should pursue a sustainable peace of freedom, prosperity, and prosperity."
Whose interests is it in the interest to break peace on the peninsula? It is not in the interests of China and South Korea or North Korea, and only two countries benefit, that is, the United States and Japan. "There is something going on on the peninsula", the United States can continue to hold on to "wartime command", and it will also worsen the security and development environment around the eastern powers; Japan's "revision of the constitution" is more justified.
After coming to power, Yoon Seok-yue took advantage of the strong anti-Chinese sentiment that was rampant among the Korean people and tried to tie South Korea to the "chariot" of the United States. For example, in November last year, Yoon Seok-yue attended a trilateral meeting between the United States, Japan and South Korea in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and on the Taiwan Strait issue, Biden began to draw a pie to boost morale, Japan and South Korea are "key allies" of the United States, and the United States will provide "comprehensive support, including nuclear weapons" for Japan and South Korea.
South Korea's New National Party congressman Won Yu-chul also said that in the short term, South Korea should invite the United States to redeploy tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, and in the long run, South Korea should develop nuclear weapons, "and the number should reach twice that of North Korea", and then achieve the purpose of "nuclear counter-nuclear and offensive defense".
Is it feasible to develop self-developed nuclear weapons?
As early as the 40s of the last century, the American "Manhattan" project spawned the world's first atomic bomb. There are two models of the basic principle of nuclear weapons, one is an atomic bomb and the other is a hydrogen bomb.
The principle of the atomic bomb: heavy nuclear fission
The nuclear charge commonly used in atomic bombs is uranium-235, which can be extracted from uranium ore, or plutonium-239, which can only be made in heavy water reactors, but the common feature of both is that they can release huge amounts of energy during fission.
The principle of the hydrogen bomb: the extreme conditions of heavy nuclear fission detonate the hydrogen bomb
The principle of the hydrogen bomb is to use the high temperature and high pressure of the atomic bomb to detonate the deuterium-tritium nuclear fusion material, so that it fuses into helium and releases huge energy, and the same mass of hydrogen nuclear fusion is more than 8 times that of heavy nuclear fission, which is why the power of the hydrogen bomb is much higher than that of the atomic bomb.
Nuclear power plant is to use the principle of heavy nuclear fission, put nuclear fuel in the reactor, and then use a neutron generator to irradiate it to produce fission, and then use a moderator to reduce the neutron energy level, making it easier to hit the uranium-235 nucleus, and then use water to absorb the generated heat, boil water to output steam to drive the steam turbine to drive the generator, which is the working principle of nuclear power plants.
After American schoolchildren developed nuclear reactors, British schoolchildren also achieved nuclear fusion in their own school laboratories! Why can't you build an atomic bomb if you can build a nuclear reactor? Although both atomic bombs and nuclear reactors use neutrons to trigger chain reactions, they are completely two ways.
The atomic bomb used a fast neutron fission system to increase the explosive power, which required a high concentration of fissile material; In order to completely use nuclear fuel, nuclear reactors use slow neutrons, and there will be moderators in nuclear reactors, such as early graphite reactors, which slow down neutrons are graphite (the reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear accident is a graphite reactor), and heavy water reactors, which use heavy water as a moderator, and light water reactors, which directly use treated water as a reducer.
The decelerated neutrons are more efficient and can be used with relatively low concentrations of nuclear fuel, such as light water reactors can be as low as 20 percent concentration, and heavy water reactors can even burn uranium ore directly. Therefore, being able to build a nuclear reactor does not mean that an atomic bomb can be built.
Natural uranium ore contains only 0.7% uranium, which was purified by three methods in the Manhattan Project, electromagnetic ("electromagnetic isotope separator"), gas ("gas diffusion") and heat ("Sorrett effect"), and now the most commonly used is centrifugation, which uses the slight difference in the mass of the nucleus between 235 and 238 to be purified step by step with a centrifuge, and finally obtains weapons-grade uranium with a concentration of more than 90%.
Building centrifuges is not difficult, the key is how to get a large number of centrifuges running at the same time to provide enough energy for uranium enrichment activities. How costly is this project? Theoretically, to purify the 52 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium needed to make an atomic bomb, tens of thousands of centrifuges would need to work nonstop for at least a year. According to statistics, during the Cold War, 17% of the electricity consumption in the United States was used for nuclear research and development activities (which is much more power consumption than virtual currency miners).
Solving the uranium enrichment problem is only the first step, and to create a real nuclear bomb, you also need high-energy explosives, and then simulate thousands of times with a supercalculator to get infinitely close to a real nuclear test explosion. Otherwise, a nuclear bomb that detonates with an unstable structure will end up wasting fissile material and turning it into a much less powerful dirty bomb. Moreover, there are satellites staring at the sky and seismic detectors on the ground, and it is simply a fantasy to want to secretly build an atomic bomb.
South Korea's Park Chung-hee secretly developed nuclear weapons during his reign, but later gave up under pressure from the United States. If South Korea wants to regain its old dreams, it is obviously not so easy? Moreover, South Korea itself is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has always pledged not to develop nuclear weapons. If South Korea develops its own nuclear weapons, Japan, which has long been bound by the "three non-nuclear principles," will certainly start the process of developing nuclear weapons on the grounds that South Korea is developing nuclear weapons. Then the global nuclear arms race will get out of hand. So all this time, South Korea has been under the US "nuclear umbrella".
Is it feasible to invite the United States to deploy nuclear weapons?
Since the 50s of last century, due to the increasingly fierce Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States has not fought the eastern powers on the frontal battlefield, so the United States has taken the initiative to provide military protection for South Korea and deployed a large number of atomic bombs in South Korea. At its peak, it once reached several hundred.
After the change in the Cold War situation, the United States could not station a large number of troops in South Korea, and in the 70s began to withdraw its troops from South Korea, and some less powerful nuclear weapons, such as nuclear artillery shells used by the army, were gradually withdrawn from South Korea.
From the collapse of the Soviet Union to around 1994, it was a critical moment for North Korea to study nuclear weapons, and in order to prevent North Korea from possessing nuclear weapons, the United States took the initiative to withdraw all nuclear weapons deployed in South Korea in order to win international sanctions and containment against North Korea.
Now South Korea is worried about North Korea at the expense of "sacrificing its own security"? Of course, it is not so simple, North Korea has more than enough to keep ahead, the United States and South Korea have an alliance agreement, while the Soviet Union has long ceased to exist, and Pyongyang has no intention or attempt to start a second Korean War.
In order to "contain China," the United States is ready to "fight big, medium, and small" with China. The "big fight" is a direct war between China and the United States; "Fighting in China" is a conflict in the Taiwan Strait, and a "small fight" is a "crisis on the peninsula." Although the "small fight" will not directly bring the war to China, it will seriously worsen China's development and security environment, forcing industrial chains and capital to move out of China. The United States may not "copy and paste" the Ukrainian model on the Taiwan Strait issue and seek "proxy war". Recently, Japan and the United Kingdom signed a new defense agreement "allowing each other to station troops on each other's territory", which is also a signal.
Once the time is ripe, it cannot be ruled out that South Korea will directly join the US-Japan anti-China military bloc and send troops to the Taiwan Strait. However, the United States has never wanted to play with China, Russia or North Korea for the security interests of South Korea. South Korea's abacus is playing quite well, but I am afraid that in the end it will "set itself on fire" and miss the hard-won peace and stability.