SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea is grappling with what many fear is a sharply deteriorating security situation and a diplomatic standstill as the North Korean threat expands inexorably.
Faraway conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have showcased the failures of defense systems against old and new missiles and armed drones, and the prospect of a productive dialogue with Pyongyang shows no signs of progress.
South Korean analysts reckon that the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un possesses some 100 nuclear warheads, with many more in the pipeline.
Mr. Kim “appears to be planning a force of at least 300 to 500 nuclear weapons. … The 300-weapon threshold could almost be reached in 2030,” a joint report by the U.S.-based Rand Corp. research institute and South Korea’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies stated last month.
The report warned: “North Korea has a nuclear weapon force that may already pose an existential threat to [South Korea] and is on the verge of posing a serious threat to the United States.”
As angst rises in Seoul and Washington, options to alter the dynamic on the divided Korean Peninsula are bleak. A deputy defense minister and a former South Korean nuclear arms negotiator acknowledge that defending Seoul from a concentrated North Korean attack is impossible and the prospect of Pyongyang abandoning its nuclear arms is unlikely.
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Indefensible
An American expatriate businessman was surprised to learn that his new luxury, high-rise apartment in Seoul’s Yongsan district had an air-defense system on the civilian building’s roof.
The air defense mechanism would make him a target, and recent developments suggest such systems offer limited utility as protection against attack.
The Palestinian militant group Hamas — using massed barrages of low-tech rockets based on the World War II-era Soviet Katyusha — overwhelmed Israel’s formerly vaunted Iron Dome low-level air defense system in its terrorist rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7.
In Ukraine, neither the Russian nor the Ukrainian air defense network has been able to counter missile and drone strikes. Likewise, classic fighting platforms — armored vehicles, surface warships and jet fighter-bombers — have fallen prey to missiles and drones.
Both theaters have highlighted the sophistication and deadliness of current targeting systems and the porousness of defense systems.
Even high-tech Seoul was humiliated in December when its forces were unable to prevent North Korean drones from crossing the Demilitarized Zone and failed to shoot them down when they loitered over civilian airports and the presidential compound.
Analysts note that drones represent a minuscule percentage of the North’s bristling arsenal, which grows by the day.
Pyongyang’s artillery arm includes several hundred ultra-long-range tubes dug into mountain slopes and trained on Seoul, just 30 miles south of the DMZ. The North’s missile forces include long-range multiple-launch rocket systems and cruise and ballistic weapons. That does not take into account Mr. Kim’s nuclear weapons.
Whether argued with conventional or atomic weapons, few war planners could dream of a more target-rich environment than densely populated Greater Seoul, home to 24 million.
In the wake of the Hamas attacks, Sung Il, a deputy minister in the office of resource management for the South Korean Defense Ministry, was blunt when asked about his country’s defensive options.
“There is no such perfect weapon system to defend all attacks from the North. They can fire more than 10,000 rounds an hour,” he told the Defense Dialogue 2023 gathering last month in Seoul.
While South Korea is building a multistage anti-missile umbrella and fields high-tech preemptive and counteroffensive assets to strike firing sites, massive damage would be inevitable.
“There is no such system in the world” that can nullify North Korea’s threat, Mr. Sung said. Although the South could “try to defend key systems and key areas … there would be serious damage on the civilian side.”
Diplomatic delusions
With defenses increasingly at a disadvantage, the prospect of productive diplomacy with the Kim regime seems farther and farther away.
U.S.-backed multilateral talks in the 1990s and 2000s failed to curb the North’s expanding nuclear arsenal, as did direct talks between Mr. Kim and President Trump that produced three face-to-face meetings but no agreements.
North Korea detonated its first device in 2006 and its most recent — with the force of 10 Hiroshima bombs — in 2017. The chances of Pyongyang abandoning these assets are zero, said an expert with direct experience negotiating with the North Koreans.
“I believe that, from the first, denuclearization talks were just an illusion,” Lee Yong-joon, chairman of the Sejong Institute think tank, told reporters. “I believe there will be no further process for denuclearization talks.”
Mr. Lee, a senior member of past South Korean nuclear negotiating teams, said Mr. Kim put his central Yongbyon nuclear complex on the bargaining table in 2019 but now has three and perhaps four secret nuclear enrichment plants to build up his arsenal.
These assets represent a massive investment and constitute the otherwise impoverished regime’s only technological edge over the South.
“Nuclear weapons are critical to the worldview Kim has created for his people to justify his brutal reign and provide a means to achieve his objective of dominating South Korea,” Rand analyst Bruce Bennett wrote on the think tank’s blog. “Eliminate the nuclear weapons, and Kim is little more than a poor leader of a weak state, ripe for overthrow.”
One diplomatic step would be for Seoul and Washington to abandon per se denuclearization demands, recognize the reality of North Korea’s nuclear status and shift to arms control talks. Still, analysts view that as a political non-starter in Washington.
Differences over deterrence
One option for South Korea would be to pursue its own nuclear arsenal, though that could lead to clashes with the U.S. given Washington’s commitment to nuclear nonproliferation and the diplomatic and security fallout from a nuclear South Korea.
“The U.S. is very unlikely to allow South Korea to create an independent armament considering its alliances with other countries,” Mr. Lee said. “If it allows South Korea, it is likely to create a nuclear ‘domino effect.’”
Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Turkey and other nations would likely press to follow suit, he said, and South Korea’s globe-spanning export economy could face punishing sanctions.
Another option is to deploy U.S. nuclear weapons in South Korea. The Asan/Rand report called for modernizing and earmarking for the peninsula some 180 U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, with about a dozen based in South Korea.
“That is unlikely to happen,” said Mr. Lee, noting U.S. offshore capabilities. The U.S. Navy “can strike North Korea by submarine from the middle of the ocean, and [tactical nuclear weapons] would also offer North Korea a target to attack within South Korea’s borders.”
Mr. Lee suggested a trilateral Japan-South Korea-U.S. missile defense, a massive increase in Seoul’s conventional forces and an expansion of the “extended deterrence” to the U.S. deployment of strategic bombers and submarines to the South this year.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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