The Arms Race on the Korean Peninsula

Abstract

Armed tensions on the Korean peninsula have been a focus of international concern for four decades. Despite such concern, little attention has been paid to the changing roles of the two heavily militarized Korean states in the arms race on the peninsula. Starting in the mid-1960s, the development courses of each half of the divided Korean nation took sharply divergent tracks. North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea, DPRK) hewed to its rigidly autarkic juche (self-reliant) posture, despite ample evidence that its development plans were not producing nearly as much as the outward looking, flexible development plans of South Korea (Republic of Korea, ROK). For most of the years since 1953, North Korea was able to look askance at the criteria used by South Koreans and their allies to judge the ROK's success. Only in the wake of Deng Xiaoping's pseudo-communist absorption of quasi-capitalist reforms in the People's Republic of China has the Kim regime shown any signs of reconsidering the correctness of its ways, but even these signs are extremely ambiguous and have not produced a significant shift in Pyongyang's fundamental attitudes toward the purposes of economic development.' In essence, North Korea sees itself without guaranteed sources of foreign political or material support and faced by an adversary that does claim such support, thus forcing the DPRK to rely on