American Nuclear Hegemony in Korea

The author draws on Cox and Schurmanns' differing conceptions of hegemony to analyze the exercise of American nuclear power in the Pacific. American hegemony was nuclear because strategic weapons were integral to alliance ideology, institutional integration, and force structures. In many ways, nuclear weapons became the military pnnciple around which regional security alliances were organized, just as capitalist production was the essence of economic hegemony. By the same token, he argues that allied elite consent is the key characteristic of a system of hegemomc nuclear alliances While the South Korean military is increasingly integrated with American nuclear strategy, the South Korean state has not publicly legitimated the strategy. To mimmize public opposition, the South Korean and American military have kept secret details of American nuclear forces in Korea. The United States especially values nuclear weapons in Korea for the message they send to the Japanese security elite, itself unable to overcome public opposition to ground-based nuclear weapons in Japan. Across the Pacific as well as in Korea, the hegemomc alliance ideology of nuclear deterrence is increasingly contradicted by the American strategy of nuclear war-fighting. As a result, American nuclear hegemony in the Pacific is vulnerable to counter-hegemonic challenges. In the short term, however, Korea is arguably the only place where an irreparable fracture could emerge in the American system of regional nuclear hegemony.