Some in South Korea are considering the development of nuclear weapons, but Koreans have already experienced the horrors of nuclear war.
The Korean Peninsula is no stranger to nuclear weapons. The quest to build a Korean bomb goes back to Kim Il Sung’s efforts in the 1950s. Beginning in 1958, the United States deployed multiple nuclear weapons systems in the South, reaching a peak of more than 900 warheads in 1967. A decade later, South Korean President Park Chung-hee was pursuing a clandestine nuclear program when U.S. President Jimmy Carter began calling for the withdrawal of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, the last of which were removed from South Korea in 1991 under a disarmament initiative by President George H.W. Bush. Despite the removal and a 1992 North-South joint declaration to denuclearize the peninsula, tensions have only increased, reaching multiple crisis points over the last quarter-century. Pyongyang’s 2002 admission that it had a uranium enrichment program was followed by its 2003 withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). In the years since, major advances in North Korea’s missile program and six underground explosive nuclear tests, including what it claimed was a “super-large hydrogen bomb” in 2017, continue to fuel tensions. During the first Trump administration, Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump exchanged apocalyptic threats, then so-called “love letters,” followed by two summits that proved to be duds. The Korean Peninsula has remained one of the world’s most volatile nuclear flashpoints and an ongoing source of concern. Since 2017, South Korean public opinion surveys have shown growing support for the country to obtain its own nuclear weapon. A Chey Institute For Advanced Studies 2023 report, citing a survey commissioned from Gallup Korea, noted that more than 77 percent of respondents “agreed that [South] Korea needs to develop indigenous nuclear weapons.” In 2023, then-President Yoon Suk-yeol explicitly stated that South Korea could deploy tactical nuclear weapons or rapidly develop its own. Others have argued that a South Korean nuclear weapon could “contain” North Korea. A 2024 Center for Strategic International Studies report challenged those high poll numbers, presenting a significantly different perspective from what author Victor Cha described as “strategic elites” (legislators, officials, experts, etc.). People in this group were much less supportive of a South Korean nuclear weapon (66 percent opposed or uncertain). Cha said the 34 percent support rate was “a better indicator of the current attitudes of South Korea toward the nuclear option.” Lee Young-ah, manager of the Center for Peace and Disarmament at People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, a South Korean NGO, said that public support for nuclear weapons varies widely depending on factors including the possibility of prolonged economic sanctions if Seoul were to withdraw from the NPT and a bilateral agreement on peaceful nuclear cooperation with the United States. Lee pointed to a Seoul National University study that indicated support for nuclear armament could fall significantly if doing so would cause a major rift in the South Korea-U.S. alliance. In contrast to a campaign to collect 10 million signatures in support of a South Korean nuclear weapon, Lee points to a member of parliament, Lee Jae-jung, who, along with other South Korean and Japanese lawmakers, launched an initiative to establish a Northeast Asia Nuclear-Weapon Free Zone. But the geopolitical landscape has shifted significantly in recent years, with North Korea and Russia cooperation deepening, heightened inter-Korean tensions, and political instability in South Korea. In April, the U.S. designated South Korea, its own ally, a “sensitive country,” which entails additional restrictions on access to U.S. research facilities. Alexis Dudden, a University of Connecticut history professor specializing in modern Korea and Japan, pointed out that the U.S. divided the Korean Peninsula at the 38th parallel immediately after the bombing of Nagasaki. “In so doing, the places we now call North and South Korea are the first states born of the nuclear age and so in that way of thinking, both are all-nuclear, all the time,” Dudden said. Unseen Scars Today as South Korean academics, politicians, and the public debate the political and economic costs of obtaining nuclear weapons, there is another group who can speak with graphic specificity on the topic. They were on the ground when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They smelt the smoke and felt the flames on those horrific summer days in 1945. For South Korea’s wonpok piheija 원폭치해자 (atomic bomb victims) and their descendants, nuclear weapons represent a painful and enduring, multigenerational open wound. According to Japanese government records, in late 1944, more than 81,000 Koreans were living in Hiroshima Prefecture and over 59,500 in Nagasaki Prefecture. Their presence was the result of the Korean Peninsula’s colonization by Japan, and, increasingly in the latter years of the war, the exploitation of Korean labor to support Japan’s imperial and military ambitions. Estimates by the Association of A-bomb Victims of South Korea suggest the combined number of Korean victims (those subjected to the atomic bombs) for Hiroshima and Nagasaki range from 70,000 to 100,000 with between 40,000 to 50,000 deaths. The exact total number of all deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, regardless of nationality, will never be known, but the tremendous scale of destruction, death, and suffering is indisputable. [caption id=attachment_290480 align=alignleft width=462] Park Jung-soon was a 12-year-old living in Hiroshima when it was destroyed by the first war-time atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. For 80 years she has been calling for recognition, compensation, and an apology from the U.S. and Japan. Photo by Mindeulle[/caption] Park Jung-soon is a Korean who was born in Nagoya, Japan. As a 12-year-old girl, she and her parents moved to Hiroshima several months before the bombing. She was in her home, roughly 2 kilometers from the hypocenter, at 8:15 a.m. as the bomb struck. When air raid sirens blared, she thought little of it, since that was a regular occurrence. But after what she describes as a “huge, strong light,” followed by an enormous sound and very strong wind, her house collapsed on top of her entire family. Park’s mother dug her and her five sisters from the rubble with her bare hands. Speaking at a side event near United Nations headquarters in March during the third meeting of states parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), Park described her injuries and the back pain she feels eight decades later. She spoke of a scene of utter chaos and horror with streets filled with dead bodies and burned and bleeding survivors falling around her. At the time, Park imagined the entire world had been destroyed. Park, who grew up speaking only Japanese, explains that shortly after the bombing her family left Japan and returned to Korea, where their suffering compounded in a morass of medical neglect, discrimination, and stigmatization. As an atomic bomb survivor – in Japanese known as hibakusha – Park was overcome with a sense of injustice and frustration. For decades she couldn’t even speak of her mental and physical anguish, but she was filled with hatred for the U.S. and Japan, both of whom she says neglected Korean bomb survivors. Park has a message for the United States: take responsibility, apologize, and pay reparations, not only to survivors, but to second and third generation descendants who still bear the pain of the bombings. She says it is time for the U.S., a country that speaks so much of human rights and freedom, to at long last recognize the injustice and acknowledge the truth. Stigmatized and Silenced For Korean atomic bomb victims, in addition to the pain and suffering caused by the bombings, they also faced discrimination in Japan and were often denied the care provided to Japanese bomb victims. In the aftermath of the bombings, Korean survivors struggled to receive assistance or any form of redress from Japan or the United States. Those Koreans who returned to Korea after the war were stigmatized and found themselves living in the shadow of a narrative that portrayed the atomic bombings as the source of liberation from Japanese colonial rule. For those Koreans who didn’t speak Japanese, after the war their social isolation and segregation meant increased suffering. After returning to Korea, many felt they had to hide their atomic bomb-induced suffering in the face of a Korean military dictatorship and ferocious anti-communist atmosphere born out of the North-South division. Under these conditions Korean atomic bomb survivors faced a very different experience from Japanese hibakusha. Seeking Redress Takahashi Yuko, a native of Hiroshima prefecture and research fellow at Osaka Metropolitan University’s research center for human rights, recently published “Korean Nuclear Diaspora: Redress Movements of Korean Atomic-Bomb Victims in Japan.” She says the experiences of Korean atomic bomb victims have been significantly different from those of Japanese hibakusha in a number of ways. Notably, Koreans who were living in Japan at the time of the atomic bombings were there primarily as a result of Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula. The majority of Koreans living in Hiroshima in 1945 came from Hapcheon County in South Gyeongsang Province in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. In the 1920s and '30s, many Korean families migrated to Hiroshima Prefecture and city, where they established roots. By contrast, many of the Koreans who were living in Nagasaki in August 1945 were single young men who had been drafted to work in ship building and factories supporting military industrial production. After the atomic bombings and end of Japan’s colonial rule, it made sense for the better-established family units to remain in Hiroshima while single, young Korean draftees had more incentive to return to Korea. One of those conscripted Korean laborers was Lee Kang-nyeong, who was born in Japan in 1927 and, as a teenager, was sent to work at a Mitsubishi shipyard in Nagasaki. On the morning of August 9, 1945, when the U.S. dropped “Fat Man,” an approximately 20-kiloton plutonium implosion bomb, on Nagasaki’s 240,000 residents, Lee had just returned to his dormitory after working the night shift. He wasn’t killed when the bomb exploded at 11:02 a.m., but his life was forever changed. He moved to South Korea later that year. Most Korean victims eventually returned to Korea after the war, though some remained in Japan. Today, many of the dwindling number of atomic bomb survivors live in the southern part of South Korea, particularly in Hapcheon, where a small museum documenting and honoring the Korean bomb victims opened in 2017. Lee Kang-nyeong’s son, Lee Tae-jae, continues the pursuit of justice as the chairman of the Descendants Association of Korean Atomic Bomb Victims. Speaking from his home in Busan, Lee told The Diplomat about efforts to pass legislation that would support survivors and their descendants. He has worked with Japanese advocates for hibakusha, and calls for nuclear justice and disarmament alongside civic and religious groups in both South Korea and Japan. Lee Tae-jae, who spoke at multiple side events at the TPNW meetings in New York in March, wants to see more attention paid to the plight of atomic bomb survivors by the governments of South Korea, Japan, and the United States. Most important, he says, is to ensure there are no future victims of nuclear weapons, a goal he says can be best achieved by their complete abolition. He continues to build solidarity with nuclear affected communities around the world including Marshall Islanders. He also raises awareness by speaking with members of the U.S. Congress who were previously unaware of Korean atomic bomb victims. Building Solidarity Another advocate for Korean bomb survivors is Sung Sang-hee, who has been calling for nuclear disarmament for more than a dozen years, attending arms control and disarmament meetings. He says that many South Koreans remain unaware of the large number of Korean atomic bomb victims. Sung is trying to build solidarity among other victims of atomic bombings and nuclear testing from Australia and New Mexico to Kazakhstan, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands. He points out that the commemoration of the 1919 Korean independence struggle on March 1 coincides with Remembrance Day marking the 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test in the Marshall Islands, saying it can bring people together in their anti-nuclear and anti-colonial activism. Sung argues that colonialism has been central to nuclear weapons development, testing, and use. One of Japan’s most prominent supporters of Korean victims and survivors is Ichiba Junko, chair of the Citizens Association for Relief of Atomic Bomb Victims. She has championed their cause for decades, helping document, support, and raise awareness around the world. Ichiba says that at the end of March 2025, there were 1,612 Korean atomic bomb survivors living in Korea who had registered with the Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Association, which was founded in 1967. She explains that the Japanese government insists the issue of compensation to Korean victims was resolved at the time of South Korea-Japan normalization in 1965 and that victims’ assistance does not apply to those living outside of Japan. As a result, more than 20 lawsuits have been filed since 1972. [caption id=attachment_290479 align=aligncenter width=1049] Representatives of Korean atomic bomb survivors participated in civil society events during the Third Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in March 2025. Photo by Korean Anti-Nuclear Peace Action[/caption] Invisible No More Ágota Duró, an associate professor at Hiroshima Jogakuin University, has researched the plight of Korean bomb victims. Duró says that in the early days after the bombings, there was little knowledge of the long-term impacts of radiation, resulting in many bomb victims not understanding the cause of their ailments and, in some cases, being mistakenly thought to have Hansen’s disease (leprosy). In the decades after the bombs, Korean survivors faced great hardship, discrimination, and isolation, but conditions gradually improved in the 1980s and '90s after South Korea’s military dictatorship ended. Relations between Korean, Japanese, and other nuclear survivors have also evolved and become more cooperative. Complex contemporary geopolitical and regional factors continue to influence the experiences of the dwindling number of atomic bomb survivors, who are now in their 80s and 90s, as well as their children and grandchildren. For Korean and Japanese victims of the atomic bombings, understanding and cooperation have led to increased international awareness of their shared experience. They are a living example that, unlike humans, nuclear weapons don’t discriminate or care where you were born. One important unifying factor for Korean and Japanese atomic bomb survivors has been the successful adoption and entry into force of the TPNW, which now includes roughly half of all U.N. member states, though notably not South Korea, North Korea, Japan, or the United States. Duró notes that the visibility of Korean atomic bomb victims and survivors has grown significantly in the last decade, especially after a 2016 speech by then-U.S. President Barack Obama while visiting Hiroshima when he referenced, “thousands of Koreans” killed by the atomic bomb. In 2023, during the G-7 Summit in Hiroshima, then-Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol visited a memorial for Korean victims of the atomic bombing. Gradually, the focus has shifted from only Japanese hibakusha to include Koreans and other nationalities killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “It is not the possession of nuclear weapons that should serve as a deterrent to its use against other nations,” Duró says. “It is the stories of hibakusha and the lessons humanity can learn from them that should deter their use.”
