Why South Korea is talking about getting its own nukes

Rash talk about nuclear weapons is common from North Korea; less so from the South. In a speech given on January 11th Yoon Suk-yeol, South Korea’s conservative president, speculated that a day may come when the threat from North Korea requires America to deploy nuclear weapons back to the peninsula. Failing that, he said, South Korea could “acquire our own nuke”. He said that this would not take long, given his country’s technological prowess.It is the first time in decades that a sitting South Korean president has talked about going nuclear. His remarks were admittedly casual, says Yang Uk of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a think-tank in Seoul, who was in the room. And they cropped up within a somewhat meandering speech that required its audience to imagine a number of hypotheticals.