A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.
SEOUL, South Korea — Brace yourself for rumbles from North Korea and headlines about “rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula” precision-striking a newsstand near you.
South Korea and the United States initiated joint military drills this week, which customarily inflame North Korea and inspire a wave of bellicose rhetorical missiles from Pyongyang.
The regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un fired its first salvo Monday by warning that Washington and Seoul will pay a “dear price” for their “adventurist acts.”
“The large-scale war drills staged by the world’s No. 1 nuclear weapons state and more than 10 satellite states against a state in the Korean Peninsula where a nuclear war may be ignited even with a spark, can never be called ‘defensive,’” said a Tuesday statement by the North Korean Ministry of National Defense. The U.S.-South Korea drills are “getting more undisguised in their military threat to a sovereign state” and are “further causing provocation and instability.”
The vibe on the streets of South Korea’s capital, just a short drive from the North Korean border, tells a different story. Seoul is calm and shows few signs of civic defense measures. Local residents say they have no contingency plans for a crisis, and even expatriates are unconcerned.
Analysts still caution that war could break out suddenly. The pre-combat indicators, in fact, could provide a casus belli — the spark for conflict on the long-divided, heavily armed Korean Peninsula.
Tense times
The exercises, dubbed Freedom Shield 2024, run through March 14. U.S. commanders said the drills feature live, virtual and field-based components. The training focuses on “multi-domain operations leveraging land, sea, air, cyber, and space assets with an emphasis on counter nuclear operations and non-kinetic effects,” a U.S. Forces Korea statement said.
Most participants are American and South Korean, but they are joined by 10 U.N. Command nations that fought for South Korea during the 1950-1953 war: Belgium, Britain, Canada, Colombia, France, Greece, Italy, New Zealand, the Philippines and Thailand.
The drills reaffirm “the unwavering commitment of the U.S. to defend [South Korea]” and “bolster security and stability … across Northeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific,” the U.S. military statement noted.
According to South Korean media reports, the exercises also “include training on detecting and intercepting the North’s cruise missiles” and 48 field drills — double the number from 2023. That uptick may be explained by security concerns and the virtual collapse of diplomatic contacts with North Korea since President Biden took office in 2021. Some analysts say the concerns are justified.
Australia’s Lowy Institute has warned of a possible “Hamas-style” assault on Seoul like the devastating surprise attack on Israel in October. A widely quoted article by the U.S.-based website 38 North in January described the standoff on the Korean Peninsula as “more dangerous than it has been at any time since June 1950” — the year North Korea invaded.
A 2018 North-South “deconfliction” agreement to establish no-fly zones and bar armed troops at the border fell apart last year. The Kim regime has closed communications channels with Seoul and Washington and added to the tension by bolstering military and economic ties with Russia.
Pyongyang has supplied as many as 3 million 152 mm artillery shells and 122 mm tactical rockets to fuel the Kremlin’s campaign against Ukraine, the South Korean government revealed last week. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has used his country’s permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council to widen cracks in the international sanctions imposed on North Korea.
With no economic levers to pull, democratic states cannot prevent Pyongyang from expanding its arsenal. A steady schedule of North Korean weapons tests, including missiles of all classes and nuclear-armed underwater drones, also have raised tensions.
Although the recent developments have tightened the screws on South Korea’s political, military and media classes, the talk of “rising tensions” seems misleading to ordinary South Koreans.
An indefensible capital
Civil defense measures, which were vigorously drilled under the authoritarian governments that ruled South Korea from 1961 to 1987, have fallen out of practice.
“There was a so-called national emergency planning office, and all major companies and agencies had an emergency planning officer,” said Moon Chung-in, a professor emeritus at Yonsei University. “They used to do ordinary peoples’ training on the 15th of every month, but that stopped as inter-Korean relations got better.”
With civil defense training proving unpopular in an increasingly prosperous, high-technology, democratic South Korea, governments reacted accordingly.
“Authoritarian regimes conducted civil defense, but there was heavy criticism in society,” Mr. Moon said. “They were ruling the country in the name of national security, so needed all kinds of gestures to support the national security machinery.”
Although systematic training is absent, Seoul has vast underground space — subway stations and tunnels, shopping concourses and apartment parking lots. Yet unlike, say, Taipei, another capital facing a constant military threat, Seoul’s shelters are poorly marked and local residents are under no pressure to take survival training classes. Reports of war preparations are newsworthy only for their rarity.
Unworried civilians
As the military exercises proceed, many South Koreans acknowledge their lack of preparation for the worst.
“I feel a little embarrassed that I don’t have specific plans” for hostilities, said Lim Eun-jung, an academic. “If something happens like a direct attack on Seoul, I think everybody would panic.
“I know [the] government has some plans …,” she said. “Anyhow, I hope they do … and I hope they can be more communicative.”
Chang Su-beom, who heads the design agency DN, acknowledged that he wasn’t even aware that military drills had started.
Regarding possible hostilities, he said, “I have never worried about it.” What would he do if missiles started landing? “I really have no idea.”
An officer worker with dual Argentine/South Korean citizenship, who did not want to be quoted by name, said she was similarly unprepared. When she first moved to Seoul, she kept a packed bag and a cache of U.S. dollars ready, with plans to “run to the airport.”
That was 14 years ago. “These days, I have no plans or preparations,” she said. “When this kind of news breaks, my parents ask me to return to Argentina.”
Expatriates agree that risks look more ominous abroad than inside South Korea.
James Kim, who heads the U.S. business organization AMCHAM Korea, said that during 20 years in South Korea, he received a lot of queries about military crisis response. No longer.
“In the past several years, I have not received a single inquiry about this topic,” he said. “Maybe just one or two calls from people who don’t know Korea or are not in Korea.”
As for global news reports of tensions, Mr. Kim said, “If these concerns were real, I wouldn’t be here.”
This attitude is mirrored in investor confidence. AMCHAM conducts an annual survey of U.S. companies in South Korea. The latest was completed in February.
“We found South Korea was the second preferred destination to establish an Asian HQ in, after Singapore,” Mr. Kim said.
Seoul capital markets have shrugged off the tensions, and retired military professionals in risk management find little business.
One said he was surprised by the dubious ideas of some expatriates, such as plans to head for U.S. bases in hopes of evacuation if war breaks out. Those bases would be prime targets for North Korean strikes, he said.
Another mistaken belief is that residents would have ample time to evacuate if war is imminent. In fact, pre-combat preparations could trigger actual combat.
“I don’t think there will be signals. For the North Koreans to win this, they would have to have complete surprise,” said Steve Tharp, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel living in South Korea. He said his South Korean family considers him “nuts” for assembling a crisis stockpile of bottled water, spam, dried noodles and toilet paper.
“The two signals our side would send would be a U.S. noncombatant evacuation and a total South Korean mobilization,” he said. “Both [capitals] recognize those as unofficial declarations of war, which would bring about hostilities.”
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.