LISTEN: How Do Joint Military Exercises Under the Nuclear Umbrella Affect South Korea’s Stance on Nuclear Proliferation?

With Jinwon Lee
In conversation with Susan A. Thornton
November 2024

Susan Thornton, Director of the NCAFP’s program on Asia-Pacific security, sits down with PhD scholar Jinwon Lee to discuss her research on the affect that U.S.-ROK Joint Military Exercises have on public opinion on nuclear weapons development in South Korea.

Read more about our Next-Generation Korean Peninsula Specialists Program here.

Jinwon LEE is Ph.D. candidate of Political Science at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She served as a researcher at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy and a research associate at the Korea Institute for National Unification. Her areas of research interest include US-Korea alliance, nuclear weapons, nuclear proliferation, and alliance politics. She received her B.A. in political science and an M.A. in international peace and security from Korea University. She is currently concluding my time as a 2023-2024 Hans J. Morgenthau Grand Strategy Fellow at Notre Dame’s international Security Center. Her doctoral research examines intra-alliance relationship patterns and intra-alliance dynamics’ impacts on each alliance member state’s behaviors. Why do some strong alliance member states provide core alliance commitments to their minor allies while others do not? Among the variety of alliance commitments, she focuses on analyzing a patron’s variance in providing a nuclear umbrella to its minor allies.