• Date: October 14th, Saturday, 2023, 14:00 – 15:30 [in Chinese]
• Location: Room 303, SNUAC (Bldg. 101)

Speaker: Liang, Zhi (Professor, Department of History, East China Normal University)
Discussant: Donghyun Woo (Professor, School of Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences, KAIST)

North Korea pursued the development of nuclear weapons after 1992, and ever since the Korean peninsula has been threatened by nuclear arms and nuclear war. As the Kim Jong-Un regime accelerates the nuclear threat through the fourth nuclear experiment in January 2016 and the fifth in September, North Korea has in fact acquired the position of a nuclear power, thus aggravating the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula to the point of not being able to predict even the nearest future.  Amidst these political trends, we are in need of exploring the politics of nuclear development that unfolded in the history of South and North Korea’s division. It would especially be meaningful to see how a Chinese scholar analyzes the Park Chung-Hee regime’s attempt at nuclear development and the US’s response to it, as this topic has not been studied in Korea so much so far. By examining the historical geopolitics of South Korea’s nuclear development, we will earn implications for the current Northeast Asian politics.

Presentation in Chinese and discussion in Korean with interpretation