ABSTRACT
While questions come and go as to whether the Republic of Korea (ROK) will pursue its own nuclear weapons in the future, for now the response to changing nuclear politics has been to overwhelm the nuclear threat from the North with conventional warfighting capacity. The ROK is the posterchild for the spread of precision weapons capabilities beyond the great powers and the new strategies or postures that such technologies can enable. The ROK’s suite of long-range conventional precision-strike capabilities and missile defence systems lend major credibility to its doctrinal goals of conventional counterforce and decapitation against the Kim regime. Despite its growing military and economic capabilities, however, the ROK has yet to show a major move towards engaging in the emerging great power dynamics of the 21st century. The North poses such a massive threat that the deterioration of United States-China relations (the former the ROK’s biggest security partner, the latter its largest trade partner) is not an attractive arena for radically new ROK foreign policy. Norms and institutions, beyond the alliance with the United States, have also provided the ROK with little security benefit. For these reasons, it is the hope for conventional dominance that best characterises the ROK’s response to changing nuclear politics.
