More than 40 percent of strategists and foresight practitioners predicted that South Korea will have nuclear weapons within the next decade, a think tank survey showed Wednesday, while nearly a quarter of them expected North Korea to use nuclear arms within the next 10 years.
The Atlantic Council, a US-headquartered think tank, released the Global Foresight 2025 Survey, which was conducted on more than 350 global strategists and foresight practitioners from Nov. 15, 2024, through Dec. 2, 2024, to predict how global affairs will unfold over the next decade.
To the question of which countries and territories will have nuclear weapons within the next 10 years, 40.2 percent of the questioned picked South Korea, putting the Asian country in third place, while 72.8 percent selected Iran and 41.6 percent chose Saudi Arabia.
In the previous survey conducted on nearly 300 experts in the fall of 2023, 25.4 percent forecast that South Korea will have nuclear arms within the 10-year period ending in 2034.
Asked which actors they expect to use a nuclear weapon within the next 10 years, 24.2 percent of the respondents in the latest survey chose North Korea, while 51.6 percent said that nuclear weapons will not be used. Of the surveyed, 25.9 percent picked Russia on the question.
More than a majority of the respondents painted a negative world outlook.
Of the total, 62.2 percent predicted the world a decade from now will generally be worse off than it is today, while 37.8 percent said the world will be better off.
Regarding the question over whether there will be another world war, involving a multifront conflict among great powers, by 2035, 59.5 percent said no, while the remainder said yes.
The survey respondents included US citizens and others spread across 60 countries, the council said. Respondents were dispersed across a range of fields, including the private sector, nonprofits, academic or educational organizations, and government and multilateral institutions. (Yonhap)
