The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [40]
The government doubled defense expenditures in the 1976 budget and continued to increase them sharply each of the next three years of Park's rule. In 1979 they doubled again, bringing them to four times the expenditure level of 1975. Although the South was devoting a far smaller percentage of its economic output to the military than the North, in absolute terms ROK military spending began outpacing that of the North in the mid-1970s, according to estimates of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Although military spending on both sides was rising, the South's by the end of the decade was more than double that of the North.
Following the fall of Saigon, Park gave high priority to his Heavy and Chemical Industries Promotion Plan, which had been initiated earlier to provide the sinews of enhanced military power. Between 1975 and 1980, more than 75 percent of all manufacturing investment in South Korea was committed to this industrial base. With these resources, Park created a mechanized army division and five special forces brigades for mobile warfare, doubled the size of his navy, purchasing U.S. ships and missiles, and modernized his air force with faster, deadlier U.S. jets and missiles.
North Korea could not keep up with the South's rapidly rising military expenditures nor its increasing lead in military technology. On the other hand, North Korea continued to increase the numbers of its troops under arms and to move more of its forces closer to the DMZ and therefore closer to Seoul, the fast-growing South Korean capital, whose center was only thirty miles south of the dividing line. Increasingly, parts of Seoul were coming within range of North Korean heavy artillery and rockets. The upshot of all this was to heighten the military tension on the divided peninsula.
THE SOUTH KOREAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM
Park's ultimate effort to secure the country's future was to launch a secret and serious effort to develop a South Korean nuclear bomb. According to Oh Won Chol, a senior adviser to Park on nuclear and military production programs, Park created an Agency for Defense Development, which included a clandestine Weapons Exploitation Committee, answerable only to the Blue House, after faster and better armed North Korean speedboats overwhelmed a South Korean patrol boat in June 1970 and forced it to the North. Only weeks later Park was shocked by the decision of the Nixon administration to withdraw the U.S. Seventh Division from Korea, despite his vehement protests. Park believed that the South Korean army was simply incapable of defending the country by itself with its outmoded arms and equipment, according to Oh. His nuclear adviser said that Park had not decided actually to produce a South Korean bomb, but that he was determined to acquire the technology and capability to do so on a few months' notice, as he and many others believed the Japanese could do. "Park wished to have the [nuclear] card to deal with other governments," Oh told me in 1996. In this field, the capability to produce nuclear weapons is almost as potent as possession of the bomb itself.
A major element in Park's effort was to acquire a reprocessing plant to manufacture plutonium, the raw material of atomic weapons, from irradiated uranium fuel, which could be produced in civilian power plants. Although most of South Korea's ambitious civil nuclear power program was based on American equipment and technology, Park steered clear of Washington in seeking reprocessing equipment and technology, and in 1972 he began working with France in this high-priority effort. By 1974 the Korean-French collaboration produced the technical design of a plant to manufacture about twenty kilograms of fissionable plutonium per year, enough for two nuclear weapons with the explosive power of the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima.
Work on an independent South Korean nuclear program and the rest of Park's defense development was centered in Taeduk, a science center south of Seoul. In 1973 South Korea began