If S. Korea’s missile defense worries China, just wait till the neighbors start nuking up.

The deployment of ballistic missile defense systems around North Korea by the United States and its allies could be an effective way to change China’s strategic thinking about Pyongyang, a U.S. congressional report said.

The Congressional Research Service made the point in a recent report, “North Korea: U.S. Relations, Nuclear Diplomacy, and Internal Situation,” saying Beijing would find it not in its national interest if provocative actions by the North lead to increased military deployments in the region. [Yonhap]

Here’s the full report, which touches on a series of topics of interest to OFK readers, including refugees, human rights, proliferation, and North Korea’s support for terrorists. The money quote is more subtle than Yonhap’s characterization:

As part of the efforts by the United States and its allies to change China’s strategic thinking about North Korea, the BMD deployments may have an impact. Chinese media made the Patriot deployments a major part of their coverage of the April 2012 launch. A subtext to those reports was that North Korea’s actions are feeding military developments in Asia that are not in China’s interests. Many observers, particularly in the United States and Japan, argue that continued North Korean ballistic missile development increases the need to bolster regional BMD capabilities and cooperation.

China’s concern about South Korean missile defenses is also one of the best arguments for a more permissive approach to South Korea’s long-standing desire to close its own nuclear fuel cycle. The countervailing concern is that South Korea will acquire nuclear weapons. Unless an Asia-Pacific Treaty Organization is in our near future—and I don’t think it is—it’s not a concern I share.

A nuked-up South Korea would be a far better deterrent to Pyongyang than the so-called “U.S. nuclear umbrella.” I can see why an impulsive young leader in Pyongyang might calculate that the Pentagon wouldn’t pull the trigger if it called our bluff. I wouldn’t.

China must be concerned about the possibility that South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan would be insecure enough about U.S. power to acquire their own nuclear weapons. They have every reason to be insecure. If the choice is between nuking up and getting rolled by China, we’ll soon see how much they value their freedom and their independence.