North Korea will Use Nuclear Weapons First in a Serious Contingency – and No One Really Quite Knows What to Do about That

This re-posts an article I wrote for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently on N Korea’s likely first-use of nuclear weapons in any serious Korean contingency.

The University of Pennsylvania invited me to participate in two-day forum on nuclear weapons back in September. This is the short paper I brought. Here it is at BAS.

My core argument is that NK will go nuclear almost immediately because: 1. It faces a very intense use-it-or-lose-it dilemma. 2. It can’t hope to win conventionally. 3. Any conflict almost immediately become existential for it.

No one really quite knows what to do in response. Missile defense doesn’t work well enough to guarantee that we can shoot down all their inbounds. And sanctions can only slow NK down, not stop their nuclear march. So my suggestion is to start deconcentrating US forces on the peninsula – to more and smaller US bases – so that they are not such a juicy hostage-taking target.

But that runs directly counter to what we have been doing here for the last decade or so – concentrating US forces in a few super-bases like Camp Humphreys. That may make logistical and financial sense. But it offers huge, inviting, clustered targets of Americans for NK to threaten or strike.

And if they NKs do nukes a US base in East Asia and kill thousands of Americans, the pressure on POUTS to massively retaliate will be enormous. And if we respond by nuking NK, the potential for spiraling escalation, including possibly China is high.

Below is my original, pre-edited and more technical version of my paper:

My Comments to the South Korean Navy’s International Seapower Symposium: A Big SK Inter-Service Budget Fight Looms

Without a headline defense budget hike, ROKA, ROKAF, and ROKN are going to collide over the costs of army manpower replacement, missile defense, and an aircraft carrier in the next decade. (I am second from the left in the picture.)

This was the gist of my comments at the South Korean Navy’s 16th Annual International Seapower Symposium here in Busan this month. Here is my Twitter thread on that event with some nice pictures. I also wrote up these ideas in an essay for 1945.com.

To my mind, a big new issue for the SK navy in the next 10-20 years is the Chinese naval threat to SK SLOCs through the South China Sea. Particularly, SK oil shipments from Persian Gulf through the SCS are vulnerable to a PLAN blockade if China gets upset at something South Korea does, like cooperation on missile defense with the US and Japan. China has already bullied SK on missile defense in the past.

China’s creeping control of the SCS will eventually allow it to ‘quarantine’ shipping there to punish SK, Japan, and Taiwan. The odds of this strike me as pretty high once China has de facto control down there. Any embargo will be done informally, first with fishing fleet and coast guard harassment, escalating if necessary. I am surprised more thinking is not given over to this possibility. It seems really obvious to me.

This is one reason why South Korea is thinking about building an aircraft carrier, which I support. Expecting the US to do all the heavy lifting in the SCS is cheap-riding, so SK. Japan, and others should consider maritime bulking up to help.

For SK, the problem is the expense of the carrier at the same time that its army and air force have new, expensive needs too:

• ROKA is facing a large manpower shortage in the next twenty years bc of SK’s birthrate is super low. ROKA will likely try to fill that gap with tech like drones and armor, which is pricier than conscript infantry.
• ROKAF faces NK’s spiraling missile program. It will need lots of missile defense and strike fighters (to hit NK missile launch sites). That too will be expensive too given just how costly THAAD and F-35s are.

These army and air force pressures will probably squeeze out the aircraft carrier – an argument I made for the Korean Institute of Maritime Strategy a few years ago (and which has turned out to be correct).

So I figure that MND will see a pretty sharp inter-service budget fight in the next decade or so unless the overall defense budget goes up. All three service branches are looking for pricey, big-ticket platforms.

My Extended Comments on Potential South Korean/Japanese Nuclearization for the Asian Leadership Conference and Foreign Policy Magazine

I spoke at the Asian Leadership Conference in Seoul a few weeks ago on S Korean/Japanese indigenous nuclearization and then published my basic thinking with Foreign Policy magazine on the topic a few days later.

Both of the venues required a more abbreviated presentation for time/space constraints, so I thought I would put up my full remarks here, at my own site. Here is the 2022 ALC site, and here is my original article for FP.

In brief, my argument is that the US should get out of the way to let Seoul and Tokyo make up their own mind. The US has long opposed ROK/Jpn nuclearization, but increasingly that strikes me as inappropriately hegemonic or strong-arming of them. There is a pretty strong case for SK and Japan to counter-nuclearize against China, Russia, and especially NK. I sketch that in detail after the jump, but the short version is:

1. The US is not going to exchange LA for Seoul/Tokyo. In 1961, de Gaulle asked JFK would he exchange NY for Paris. JFK waffled; de Gaulle was no idiot; he built French nukes shortly afterwards. The logic is the same here. The US is not going to fight a nuclear war solely for non-Americans. This will raise endless, irresolvable credibility debates between the US and its Asian allies. The best way to resolve that is to do what our European allies did – self-insure through indigenous nuclearization.

2. Trump will likely get elected – or ‘elected’ – in 2024, and he will ‘blow up’ the ROK alliance as he promised he would. So ROK nuclearization may happen no matter what we think. And a US retrenchment from SK would probably scare Japan so much that the whole nuclear debate there would shift substantially to the right.

There is a lot of anxiety about this step, and I share it too. So I don’t endorse SK/J nuclearization. But there is SK polling showing high interest in this, and SK is terribly exposed to NK nuclear devastation with few good options as the NKs continue to build relentlessly. (All this I cover below.) So the least we Americans can do is get out of the way and let them debate it themselves.

The original, pre-edited FP essay on this follows below the jump:

Does South Korea Need a Aircraft Carrier? Creeping Chinese Control of the South China Sea’s Oil Sea Lane is the Best Argument for It

There has a been a pretty vibrant debate in South Korea over building an indigenous aircraft carrier. That debate has been especially resonant where I live – Busan – because it would probably be built here.

This post is a re-up of an op-ed I wrote for the Japan Times this week. I also wrote on this once before for a ROK navy-adjacent think-tank.

IMO, the best argument for a ROK carrier is China’s creeping, long-term effort to dominate the South China Sea. Oil from the Persian Gulf traverses the SCS on its way to East Asia’s democracies – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan. Chinese control of the SCS oil sea lane would allow the PLAN to embargo carbon imports for whatever bogus reason Beijing could think of.

We can be sure that Chinese bullying in the region will use this tool as soon as China consolidates control of the SCS and puts up enough bases to launch blockades. Indeed, I have long thought that this is the primary reason China wants to control the SCS so badly. It’s not clear that there are a lot of natural resources in the seabed there or that they can be cost-effectively extracted. And all the little islands and sandbars in the SCS aren’t valuable in themselves.

But this would require SK to start seriously thinking about 1) power projection southward, 2) contesting Chinese sea control inside the first island chain, and 3) cooperating with Japan which is also threatened by this and which has a larger navy. That would all be great but is a big ask for a country not used to thinking about foreign policy much beyond the peninsula. And that is my big concern: that the previous Moon administration really wanted to build this because Japan is building an aircraft carrier, and wants to park it next to Dokdo. That is the wrong reason to build one.

Here is the original, pre-edited version of my essay from the Japan Times:

South Korean has considered, in the last year, constructing a light aircraft carrier. This has provoked controversy. The decision to build it or not has swung back and forth. The South Korean navy very much wants it and has made a public push for it. The South Korean legislature, the National Assembly, ultimately decided to fund it last year. But the government of new President Yoon Seok Yeol is apparently re-considering.

South Korea the Land Power

Most countries in the world lean into either land or sea power, as dictated by their geography. Unsurprisingly, island states develop ‘blue water’ (i.e., ocean-going) navies. Japanese modernization, for example, lead to maritime power in the last century and half. Britain too had a large navy at its peak.

South Korea would appear to fit into this box. It is an island of sorts. It has just one land border, but that is tightly sealed. So strategically, South Korea is nearly an island.

But necessity has made South Korean a land power nonetheless. Its border with North Korea is the most militarized place on the planet. The North Korean army numbers over one million active-duty soldiers, with millions more in reserve. North Korea’s air and naval power are small in comparison. A second Korean war, like the first one, would mostly be fought on the ground.

South Korea’s New President is Probably a Bland Centrist – and That’s Fine

This is what a peaceful transition of power looks like, American Republicans! Moon and Yoon follow the rules. That’s good. Learn from that.

This is a repost of an article I wrote for The Japan Times.

My impression from teaching my student is that the new South Korean president, Yoon Seok-Yeol, ignites no enthusiasm. He reminds them of their grandfather – old, kinda out-of-touch, lacking charisma. But honestly, after 5 year of Moon Jae-In’s rollercoaster with Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un, I’ll take some bland boredom.

Yoon jumped into the race last year and does not have deep roots on the right here. Most importantly, he does not (seem to) share SK right’s fatiguing obsession with vindicating impeached former conservative president Park Geun-Hye. Park was guilty already! Get over it. I am hopeful that means he won’t prosecute Moon in his post-presidency solely for revenge, which I think almost any other traditional right-wing POTROK would do.

On policy, Yoon will lean to the right. He’ll be conservative on social mores – no gay marriage, no anti-discrimination law (sigh) – but he won’t be Trump. On economic issues – chaebol power, overlong work hours – he’ll do nothing, unfortunately. But at least on NK, we won’t have to hear anymore about what a misunderstood great guy Kim Jong-Un is. Enough of that. Those calling him the Donald Trump of Korea are probably just casting around for a label. Yoon doesn’t behave like Trump at all, thankfully.

Here is my essay for The Japan Times:

Yoon Seok-Yeol was inaugurated president of South Korea this week. He is a former prosecutor who only entered politics in the last year. He is from the conservative People Power Party. But he has no roots in that party or its various factions. Nor does he seem particularly ideological. He channels the basic anti-communism – aimed at North Korea – of the South Korean right. That has long been the core motivator of South Korean conservativism. But beyond that, he seems like a bland centrist.

This is a surprising turn. There is no obvious reason why South Korean conservatives would want him as their candidate, beyond simply defeating the left in the election. Yoon has no particularly programmatic interest in domestic politics. He is not a libertarian or religious social conservative, for example.

He has been called the ‘Donald Trump of Korea,’ but that feels mostly like foreign journalists grasping for an ideological handle for him. If he is a Trumpian populist, he has not talked that way. Trump’s signature mix of bombast, racism, tariffs, and loud nationalism is not how Yoon campaigned.

Please read the rest here.

S Korea’s Confused Response on the Ukraine War wasn’t just Reflexive Mercantilism, but also the Leverage Autocracies Gain Over Democracies who Trade with Them Too Much

South Korea got a lot of (deserved) criticism for its erratic, corporate-profits-uber-alles approach to the Ukraine War. It has since come around, but only after the US twisted its arm with export control threats. And its MPs mostly skipped Zelensky’s speech to the SK parliament. All in all it was a pretty poor showing.

This is a re-post of a column I wrote a few days ago for the Japan Times. For other commentary in the same vein, try here, here, and here.

Some of this was straight-up mercantilism. The government complained about corporate investments in Russian being put at risk, plus the wider trade relationship. That came off so callous and tone-deaf that South Korean citizens pushed back. But it illustrates a long-established problem in South Korean foreign policy: the country’s largest corporations are far too influential, creating a what’s-good-for-Samsung-is-good-for-Korea mentality which is wrong, plutocratic, and undemocratic.

But the larger issue applies to all democracies trading a lot with autocracies: trade creates leverage, and autocracies are happy to weaponize it. China already did this in the THAAD fight with S Korea a few years back; New Zealand has gotten criticism as a weak link; American businesses like Disney and the NBA have been craven before China. All of us democracies are going to have to start unwinding our economies from nasty dictatorships to avoid betraying our values for corporate profits, and since China is South Korea’s biggest export market, the new Yoon government should start that now.

Here is that Japan Times essay:

The Ukraine war has a been a unique challenge to Asia’s democracies. The war is far away. It involves peoples cultural distinct from this region, and its impacts will be most directly felt in Eastern Europe. Russia’s complaints and motivations mostly concern the West, particularly the post-Cold War European settlement which much reduced Russian power there. Inevitably then, the West’s response has been the most active. It is in the firing line.

But there are Asian ramifications too, which Japan, to its credit, seems to have grasped. Despite long hesitation on the use of sanctions – despite the regular use of sanctions by its American ally – Tokyo appears to have decided that this Russian aggression needs to be punished. The Russian invasion is blatant imperialism. Were Russia to get away with absorbing a smaller neighbor as the world watched, it would send a powerful signal to China that it could do the same to Taiwan. That would be a direct security threat to Japan. And Russian tactics – the purposeful shelling of civilian areas, and the operation of death squads to murder civilians en masse – have been a moral shock. Japan’s decision to support the sanctioning of Russia looks increasingly like the right call.

By contrast, South Korea’s response has a been mixed bag. When the war started, Seoul’s response was hesitant and ambiguous, provoking a wave of international criticism which the government neither seemed to understand, nor know how to respond to. The first response of South Korean President Moon Jae-In’s administration was fear for South Korean exports to Russia. Lee Jae-Myung, the leftist candidate in the recent presidential election at the time, blamed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for provoking the invasion, which brought another wave of social media backlash. For days, it was not clear if Seoul would support the sanctions regime. South Korea only came around when the US threatened a trade exemption its exporters need.

Read the rest here.

South Korean President-Elect Yoon Suggested Preemptive Strikes on N Korea. There will be a Lot More of that Talk if the NKs Don’t Slow Down, which They Won’t

This was accepted and then withdrawn by a SK newspaper as too controversial even though the SK president himself suggested this. I don’t get that…

So I sent it to 1945.com instead. Basically the problem is that neither missile defense nor negotiations are dependable enough to protect South Korea against what is emerging as an existential threat to SK from North Korea’s spiraling missile program. Missile defense does not work well and is very expensive. Negotiations might reduce the North Korean arsenal but almost certainly not enough to eliminate the state- and society-breaking threat of the North’s nuclear missiles

Yoon’s answer is preemptive strikes on NK missile sites in event of a crisis. He got a lot criticism as a reckless war-monger earlier this year, and his suggestion is obviously hugely risky. It could provoke the very war it is trying to defend against. But he is ‘thinking the unthinkable’ as they used to say. Presidents must think about this stuff; that’s Yoon’s job, and if you don’t like his answer, come up with something else.

North Korea increasingly has the ability to rapidly devastate South Korea. The North Korean missile program is mature – more missiles, faster, longer-range, more easily fueled, more maneuverable, and so on. Its nuclear program is maturing too. Kim Jong Un now wants to develop tactical nuclear warheads and MIRVs. And this frightening arsenal is unsupervised. There are no inspectors, no NPT, no IAEA.

So yes, let’s keep talking. And yes, let’s keep throwing money at missile defense and pray it works. But when your facing an orwellian tyranny right next door who has aggressively threatened you for decades, you inevitably start thinking about options which might otherwise seem extreme.

Here’s that 1945 essay:

South Korea’s Debate over Preemption is the Inevitable Result of North Korea’s Rapid Missilization – As a presidential candidate, South Korean President-Elect Yoon Seok-Yeol suggested that South Korea might need to preemptively strike North Korea because of its spiraling missile development. This was criticized as provoking the very conflict it seeks to avoid. Obviously, no one but the most belligerent hawks seeks confrontation with North Korea. A second Korean War would be devasting, which Yoon clearly knows. Instead, Yoon is identifying, correctly, a growing strategic threat to South Korea – one which might become genuinely existential if left unchecked.

The North Korean Missile Challenge:

The conventional inter-Korean stalemate is deadlocked on the ground. In fact, North Korea is gradually losing that stand-off as American and South Korean technological prowess outstrip its large but antiquated conventional forces. The North knows this too. It has therefore invested for decades in nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. These capabilities help it level the playing field.

Please read the rest here.

The S Korean Presidential Election: A Third-Party Leftist Candidate Threw the Election to the Right

This is a local re-post of a column I wrote for the Japan Times on the election.

Basically, the left should have won. Its combined vote total was 1.5% greater than the right’s. But that vote was split over two parties (47.83% and 2.33%), with a small left-alternative party pulling away enough votes for the right (48.56%) to win the election.

As I argue in this Twitter thread, this election is a textbook example of Duverger’s Law and strategic voting in action. Whenever I discuss this in class, students always complain about strategic voting. The voters hate it. Everyone wants to vote their heart (sincere voting). But in a plurality race, that is a great way to throw the election to the other side.

In fact, the irony of sincere voting is that your precisely your enthusiasm to pull policy further to the left (in this case) by voting for the left-alternative party actually pushes policy to the right. That is, South Korea’s most convinced leftists delivered the country a right-wing government.

There are alternatives, like proportional representation (like in Germany) or double balloting (like in France). But that usually requires constitutional changes, so it’s best to follow the math not ideology. Which sucks. But I don’t see an alternative.

Here’s that Japan Times essay:

In South Korea’s election this week, the conservative candidate Yoon Suk-yeol, of the People Power Party, defeated progressive Lee Jae-myung by just 0.73%.

Less reported in the international press is the fact that an alternative left-wing candidate, Sim Sang-jung, also ran. She received 2.33% of the vote, which almost certainly would have gone to Lee, of the ruling Democratic Party, had she not run. Sim “threw” the election to Yoon, as her votes would have given Lee a clear victory margin.

South Korean presidential elections reward the candidate with the most votes. This plurality requirement strongly encourages all voters on the right and left to converge around one unity candidate for each side. Small-party candidates can pull away votes from an ideologically similar, large-party candidate who might otherwise win.

Please read the rest here.

The Inter-Korean Stand-Off Needs Political Resolutions, Not ‘Peace’

This is a re-up of an essay I wrote a few weeks ago at 1945.com on the debate over an ‘end of war’ declaration in Korea. The debate has passed, but it was pretty hot in December and January, when Moon was pushing pretty hard for it.

My big concern about the end-of-war declaration was that no really knew what it means. If it were a treaty, it would be called a treaty and would be binding. But since it is not, would it be binding? No one really knows.

It is highly unlikely that North Korea would alter its behavior because of it, so I think the drive behind was: A) Moon’s desire for some kind of legacy after 5 years of hyperbolic but failed diplomacy with the North, and B) grounds for the activist left in South Korea to say that the US and UN should leave South Korea and that UN sanctions should be rolled back. 

If the South Koreans want us to leave, then of course we should. But I wish Moon’s coalition were more honest about why they sought this thing. The Biden administration dragged its feet until Moon finally dropped it. It is painfully obvious that Biden does not trust Moon after he played Trump (to meet Kim by suggesting he’d win a Nobel) and is just waiting for the next POTROK.

Here’s that essay:

As the presidency of Moon Jae-In in South Korea winds down, Moon has pushed hard for an ‘end of war declaration’ (EoW) over the still legally unfinished Korean War. Last week, I argued in this magazine that this declaration is curious approach. The inter-Korean armistice is pretty stable, and when it is broken, it is North Korea which does the breaking through its frequent border provocations. Also, legally, no one really knows what this declaration would do. A treaty is the well-established tool for ending wars; an EoW declaration is a diplomatic neologism. It is not clear if this declaration is intended to replace the armistice or a potential treaty, or supplement them in some unknown way. Or perhaps it is just symbolism.

For the rest, do here please.

South Korea’s Very Limited Re-Opening

This is a local repost of an essay I wrote last week for The National Interest. 

I wrote it in response to growing interest in the US in ‘re-opening.’ South Korea is further along the corona timeline than the West, and it dealt with corona very well. So if there is any economy ready to re-open, you would think that it is South Korea’s. Except that that is not really happening.

It’s true that restaurants are re-opened, that you can eat in them in proximity without a mask, and that masking generally is declining a bit. But not much. And most things are still closed – schools, concerts, museums, aquariums, marathons, whatever. And the government here is not talking about mass opening at all like the US discussion, especially on the right. In fact, it’s the opposite. The South Korean government keeps saying this will be a long slog, at least for the rest of the year.

The full essay follows the jump: