Seventy-one years to the day since North Korea invaded the South, one of the ROK’s highest-profile politicians declared that Seoul should go nuclear — and kicked a hornets’ nest that shows no signs of dying down.

“It’s the June 25 anniversary today,” Na Kyung-won, a frontrunner to lead the conservative People Power Party (PPP), wrote on Facebook last week. “Now we have to arm ourselves with nuclear weapons too.”

The ruling party lawmaker’s sudden endorsement of a fundamental shift in how South Korea should deter North Korea came just days after a U.S. aircraft carrier visited the peninsula, in what