With Washington reportedly demanding that South Korea pay more to have U.S. troops stationed in the country, a former South Korean foreign minister says he has a solution for Seoul: the development of its own nuclear arsenal.
Song Min-soon, who also once served as the country's chief negotiator for the six-party talks aimed at denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, suggested in an editorial Monday in the JoongAng Ilbo daily that one way Seoul could seek to share the base-hosting burden is by building up its own arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons.
"It's necessary for South Korea to move on to a self-reliant alliance from a dependent alliance," he wrote, adding that "a defensive nuclear capacity, with a missile range limited to the Korean Peninsula, is justified."