What if South Korea quits the NPT and goes nuclear?
Seoul leaving the NPT to weaponize unravels Asian nonproliferation — risk-off bid to vol and primes, high-beta sold, but no oil channel so the move is equity/credit-led. No precise analogue; the closest is the 1970s ROK covert program Washington shut down, never market-tested. Transmission: Korea is the memory/foundry chip linchpin (Samsung, SK Hynix) and runs huge surpluses with China and the US; the forward risk is US sanctions-or-tolerance ambiguity hitting KOSPI and global semis far more than defense names.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Seoul withdraws from the NPT and builds nuclear weapons, unraveling Asian nonproliferation. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Defense spending ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.