USA gives South Korea green light to build nuclear submarines

I would be very worried about any form of built in kill switch / degrade effectiveness based on recent F-16 fiasco that sobered entire Europe into massive military spending.

Trust lost is trust that either never comes back or it takes tremendous, long term continuous effort. Not holding my breath.

It takes a lot of centrifuges to refine the amount and, more importantly, the purity of fissile material. By the time you need them, it would take a long time to spin up that infrastructure and iron out the kinks.

It’s not a casual undertaking and other nations will know you’re doing it. The major global powers are not interested in more nuclear weapons, not only to maintain their hegemony but also to limit the number of parties that could cause massive issues. Not to mention the likelihood that a national or political shift could mean nukes in the hands of those less…restrained.

Plus it raises the surface area of others gaining access to the material or capabilities. Proliferation is bad for the world, generally.

> What am I missing about how hard it is to enrich uranium?

The challenges are primarily geopolitical. There are uranium enrichment operations in a number of countries around the world. Weapons grade enrichment is a lot harder, but nothing that a sufficiently funded and motivated nation state couldn’t achieve if they wanted to and, most importantly, didn’t have any other countries discover it.

> Processing, 700kg of uranium does not sound insurmountable, even with a terribly slow and inefficient process.

You have to get enough uranium ore, process that down, then enrich it on a large scale. Uranium ore deposits aren’t very uranium dense except for a few known mines, so pulling rocks out of the ground in another country may produce extremely low yields.

Enrichment is a very slow process requiring a lot of stages because U235 and U238 are barely different, so they don’t separate much in each stage. Everything has to work together and work well. Like you said it’s not insurmountable, but by the time a country has spent years mining low-yield ore and building complicated many stage centrifuges they’re likely to make a mistake that leads to an intelligence agency catching on.

I mean Iran is certainly managing it, so I think it's mostly a political will / will this get you attention and coup'd thing?

Would environmental damage be a big deal if the reactor exploded? It seems odd that people care very much about nuclear power plants, but relatively little about nuclear submarines, which are just smaller power plants.

The USS Thresher was lost at sea when it sunk below its test depth and imploded. I wonder if there was any damage whatsoever from the fallout. https://youtu.be/g-uJ1do3yV8?si=CLFS80oo564PKouo

Also the USS Scorpion if I remember correctly.

If the environmental effects don’t matter, then I’m surprised it’s ever been a big deal in the first place. Also slightly surprising that we don’t have nuclear sub-sized power plants powering neighborhoods or cities.

I guess one big difference is that any nuclear sub accident would be located far from populated areas. But has there been any studies of how bad the fallout from one of these smaller reactors could be? If it’s 1/100th the size of Chernobyl, it seems like the maximum damage could be 1/100th of Chernobyl, which may or may not be a sufficient buffer.

Someone downthread joked about using nuclear powered submarines to transmit electricity back to the mainland, but it seems plausible to build a nuclear sub sized reactor offshore (just the reactor, no sub) while enjoying the safety benefits that this class of nuclear reactor apparently has.

3 months. There's an episode by smarter everyday about it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Warspite_(S103)

Seems like the record is 111 days submerged.

Nuclear Subs are typically pretty big so they can probably bring enough food to last for the entire time without resupply.

That's just not true? South Korean ministers have been discussing building nuclear submarines domestically long before this current agreement.

And the US has an agreement with South Korea that limits domestic production of fissile material for military uses but it's a mutual agreement that we have with a bunch of countries (including China) and is essentially always renegotiable as situations change. Essentially it's just an explicit agreement of how much material a given country intends on producing for the purposes of requiring public political discussions domestically before ramping up production.

That is all very much a flexible situation and the US doesn't have any actual power to legitimately stop South Korea from manufacturing domestic nuclear reactors for military purposes.

Citation needed. I am unable to find any treaty that prevents the RoK from building nuclear submarines on their own territory.

> Or maybe Korea could be like India...and not be part of it

Sure. That comes with costs. Cost that may not make sense for Korea, which is a defense exporter globally and within the American-led Pacific alliance.

(Operating a nuclear shipyard and supply chain is incredibly expensive. It's would also be a high-value target for Pyongynag.)

> your native country

Is this a troll account? (EDIT: 4 months old. Peeked through comment history. All flamebait and racism. Flagged.)

> a loophole seoul doesn't need

You're using the word "need" ambiguously. It's a loophole Seoul benefits from. It gets the benefits of being an NPT signatory and alliance member. And it gets nuclear submarines.

We can debate the costs and benefits. But Seoul wasn't coerced into building a nuclear submarine. Put plainly, it's unclear what security benefits it gets from one given it doesn't project into blue waters.

> You act like america is doing korea a favor

Within narrow confines, it is. Within broader confines, it's acting as the senior security partner. That obviously involves a cession of sovereignty. Same goes for Pakistan vis-a-vis China, or Belarus with Russia.

America is doing South Korea a favor. It could ratchet sanctions (see: Iran) and ravage SK’s position and economic power on the global stage without its sign-off.

> The US won't allow south korea to enrich uranium on their own. Want to try again?

190 nations have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This includes China, so the very US vs China premise here is misplaced.

[The US, UK, France, Russia, China and 185 other countries] won't allow south korea to enrich uranium on their own