Endangering alliance or risking proliferation?: US-Japan and US-Korea nuclear energy cooperation agreements

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand why the United States treated Japan and Korea differently in the revisions of bilateral nuclear cooperation agreements. On the sensitive issue of grating its allies the rights of developing enrichment and reprocessing (ENR), the United States did so for Japan in the 1977 and 1987 revisions, but did not for Korea during the 2015 revision. For the great power as a supplier state, there are two factors affecting the decision: policy-makers' concern about alliance management prior to the calculation of security outcome, and firms' commercial interests. In order to avoid damage to the US-Japan alliance and to maintain Japan's complementation for the US nuclear industry, Washington granted the rights of ENR to Tokyo. In contrast, because of its confidence of managing the US-Korea alliance and partly because of incompatibility of commercial interests between the two, Washington did not grant the rights to Seoul at the 2015 revision. Based on the comparison of the two cases, this paper underscores a need to alter the power projection theory regarding nuclear proliferation by explicating the alliance management as the ex ante element of power projection and by accounting for commercial interests such as fuel sale and technological partnership.