Atomic Dissociation in South Korea: The Politics of Technology, Memory, and Modernity in the 1970s

While North Korea’s nuclear weapons program draws global attention, South Korea has quietly built one of the most advanced nuclear energy industries in the world. Since the 1970s, nuclear technology has supported South Korea’s rapid economic growth and energy security, culminating in its emergence as a nuclear reactor exporter by 2009. Yet this development has received limited scholarly scrutiny.
This dissertation argues that South Korea’s embrace of nuclear energy was made possible by a cultural mechanism called “atomic dissociation”: the tendency to highlight the utopian promise of nuclear technology—limitless energy, national strength, scientific progress—while suppressing its destructive legacy. This allowed nuclear power to be framed as essential to South Korea’s Cold War-era goals of development, decolonization, and security, even as the memory of Hiroshima and the risks of nuclear catastrophe were downplayed.
Through a range of Korean- and English-language sources, including technical reports, media, treaties, and protest materials, this study reveals how multiple actors—technocrats, dissidents, scientists, and civil society groups—engaged nuclear technology on different terms. Rather than a neutral tool, nuclear power emerges as a contested site where visions of modernity, justice, and autonomy were negotiated. This dissertation repositions South Korea within global nuclear history and calls into question widely held assumptions about the relationship between technological progress and human advancement.