Chapter V: Will there be War?

Chapter five considers the common implications imposed by nuclear weapons and radioactive fallout for the postcolonial states of the Korean peninsula. There, atomic arsenals and the geographic of fallout were constantly entangled with the issue of national sovereignty in the postcolonial world. Starting in 1945, rumours of Korean uranium reserves helped fuel accusations of continued colonial relations in both the North and the South. The Korean War, and the pivotal role that nuclear diplomacy played in that conflict, further centred the question of weapons and the nation. These issues only grew in importance during the postwar period. By the late-1950s, scientists in both sectors were laying the groundwork for domestic nuclear science programs in conjunction with American and Soviet material support and technical expertise. These entries of atomic technology were frame by two competing discourses on an atomic pax. In the North and the South, the technology was presented as a systemic-specific form of science that expressed the competitive developmentalism of the post-war period. Moreover, the paralleled introduction of the technology suggested that the Koreas were included in the progressive march of history as sovereign subjects. However, these tailored introductions also emphasized the peninsula’s continued subordination to new metropoles.

These circumstances are examined through this chapter in two ways. The first is through the new modes of sight made possible by atomic science. The development of atomic science in Korea made researchers and general readers alike keenly aware of the ways in which the transnational circulation of radioactive particles were piercing the borders of the nation. Wedged between testing grounds in the Soviet Union and the South Pacific, fallout and its detection was a testament at the atomic level to the limits of the sovereign nation. An even more explicit statement of this fact were the weapons themselves. The spectre of an atomic attack, often conjured through rumour, was a feature of peninsula politics from the onset of division. However, war heightened these concerns. By 1950, and again in 1953, American leaders openly discussed the use of atomic weapons in Korea. By 1958, a permanent arsenal of weapons were maintained in the South. This served as the backdrop to the first wide-spread anti-proliferation movement in Korea. Emerging in North Korea in the late 1950s, at the center of this movement was the question of empire and its regional rearticulations. Beyond anti-Americanism, this question touched on increasingly divisive debates in the Socialist sphere over the terms of the Cold War. While the Soviets searched for a pathway towards detente and a balance between powers, new actors emerging in the postcolonial world called for a continued politics of resistance against imperial formations. Few events were more consequential in this debate than the Chinese development of an atomic bomb in 1964. This event, followed closely in both Koreas, marked the expansion of the nuclear arsenal beyond Euro-America, opening a new chapter in Cold War and regional geopolitics that was increasingly shaped by the actors of the third world. As a whole, the project stages the technoscientific facets of the Cold War through a study of two opposing states, defined as much by their textured encounters with postcoloniality, as by the terms of a Manichean worldview.