During the 1960s, North Korea trumpeted war of liberation with added intensity and elevated unification as the nation’s top priority. This was intended to preclude Park Chung Hee’s political consolidation and obstruct Seoul’s diplomatic penetration in the Afro-Asian bloc. Previously, the accelerated promotion of Pyongyang’s war of liberation has been associated only loosely as a function of its longstanding ideological affinity with China. The present study aims to establish a more specific relationship by demonstrating that China’s nuclear status, anticipated throughout the early 1960s and finally confirmed in October 1964, emboldened North Korea by putting South Korea on the defensive and forcing Seoul to launch a reluctant search for refashioning anti-communism. The expansion of Chinese influence in the uncommitted parts of Asia and Africa, along with heightened prospects for membership in the United Nations, allowed North Korea to operate from an inflated sense of ideological superiority to win the Third World and defeat the Park regime. For South Korea, China’s nuclear rise further compromised Seoul’s standing in the Third World, potentially threatened to erode international support for “one Korea” policy, and sparked for the first time a wide-ranging domestic debate on the need for new strategies to engage the nonaligned countries without prejudice to anti-communism.