Tactical Nuclear Weapons and NATO.pdf - Program on Strategic ...

ons throughout the Cold War <strong>and</strong> adopted a similar
approach towards indications of U.S. nuclear-related
activities on Okinawa in the 1960s <strong>and</strong> early 1970s. 40
In the Republic of Korea (ROK), meanwhile, only the
nation’s president knew where U.S. nuclear weapons
were located in the country, <strong>and</strong> open discussion of
U.S. nuclear weapons on the peninsula was considered
potentially seditious. 41 As Army Chief of Staff
General Edward Meyer rather impoliticly remarked
about planning for limited nuclear operations while
in Korea in January 1983, “It’s far simpler here than
in Europe where consultations have to be made with
fifteen different sovereign nations.” 42 Consequently,
policies such as the U.S. intention to reduce its reliance
on nuclear forces could proceed with far less obstruction
in Asia than in Europe, where the initiative
ran headlong into the Europeans’ vocal fear that the
Americans were simply seeking to make superpower
war safe for the European continent.
In Asia, therefore, governments have historically
been far less interested in seriously challenging U.S.
nuclear weapons policy, remaining largely unaware
of actual U.S. planning <strong>and</strong> deployments, <strong>and</strong> until
relatively recently, lacking the wherewithal to bring
pressure on Washington. Moreover, even despite the
narrowing of the power imbalances between Washington
<strong>and</strong> its Asian allies, the fundamentally hierarchical
nature of U.S. alliances with its Asian partners
has persisted. Indeed, U.S. Asian allies have at times
continued to insist in important ways that such a hierarchical
relationship endure. The right-leaning Lee
Myung Bak administration in Seoul, for instance, in
2010 successfully pressed to delay implementation of
the plan to withdraw South Korean forces from wartime
U.S. control in a peninsular war, a totemic issue
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