ARGUMENT: PREEMPTING NUCLEAR ATTACKNavigating South Korea’s Plan for Preemption

South Korea has invested in systems designed to thwart a North Korean nuclear attack by preempting North Korean nuclear launch and attack missiles before they are launched. South Korea’s preemption strategy also calls for attacking the leadership and command and control nodes that support Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction enterprise.

Clint Work writes in War on the Rocks that this preemption system “is a network of interlinked offensive and defensive missiles and multidomain platforms and ultimately is undergirded by the assurance that South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has sought since winning election: A more robust nuclear guarantee from the United States.

Work continues:

The Biden administration has sought to manage South Korea’s interest in both nuclear weapons and preemption since taking office. And, in April, the two sides reached agreement on the first-ever standalone alliance document issued at the presidential level solely devoted to the U.S. extended deterrence commitment to South Korea. The Washington Declaration’s takeaway was the establishment of an alliance Nuclear Consultative Group, signaling a potentially unprecedented level of bilateral consultation surrounding U.S. nuclear policy and planning. However, the declaration’s mention of the Republic of Korea’s yet-to-be established Strategic Command, dubbed ROK STRATCOM for short, has received minimal attention. The Biden administration’s effort to link this command with Republic of Korea/United States Combined Forces Command suggests that Washington is willing to offer more concrete assurances to Seoul but also wants to try and limit escalation in the event of a crisis.

South Korea’s Strategic Command aims to enhance the country’s nonnuclear strategic deterrence in different ways. First, it seeks to bolster deterrence by denial — to deter North Korea’s nuclear and unconventional threats by making them infeasible or unlikely to succeed. The goal is to undermine North Korean confidence that it can achieve its objectives through nuclear coercion. Second, Strategic Command would enhance deterrence by punishment by threatening to impose substantial costs up to and including decapitation strikes against North Korean leadership in the event of North Korean nuclear or weapons of mass destruction use against South Korea. 

Even for the most focused Korea watchers, it was noteworthy that Korea’s Strategic Command was included in the declaration. So, what is this seemingly obscure command, and why was it included in a presidential-level alliance document?  This command’s sudden prominence reflects several interconnected yet conflicting currents within the U.S.-Korean alliance. These include Seoul’s efforts to leverage advanced conventional means to achieve nonnuclear strategic deterrence; an alliance effort to build conventional-nuclear integration; and a sometimes contentious dance between U.S.-imposed constraints and South Korean hedging, grounded in the alliance’s history yet more urgent in the face of a rapidly advancing North Korean threat and shifting strategic environment. 

The U.S. government’s concerns about escalation on the Korean Peninsula are not new, but these concerns have now been reinforced: South Korea’s rhetoric about preemption, along with North Korea’s nuclear advances, have contributed to increasing tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Work concludes:

South Korea’s Strategic Command is a hedging strategy, designed to ensure that the leadership in Seoul can act promptly during a crisis without interference from the United States. This approach is not necessarily due to a lack of trust in America’s extended nuclear deterrence. Instead, South Korea’s leadership appears to believe it cannot necessarily trust the United States to act quickly during a crisis. For one, U.S. attention and resources could be pulled elsewhere to another contingency. Moreover, given the simple fact that no matter how much deeper the alliance consults within the Nuclear Consultative Group, any possible decision to use nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula will be made in Washington by an American leader — current and future.

The constant talk of preemption, however, provides easy justification for North Korea to continually build more nuclear weapons. The result is that both sides may now be incentivized to adopt a “go-first” mentality during a crisis. As Ankit Panda rightly notes, this raises the possibility of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un adopting more dangerous command and control practices in a crisis, like delegating nuclear authority so North Korea’s weapons can be used even if he is incapacitated or killed. 

The development of Strategic Command, although understandable, quickens the pace of the decades-old security dilemmas on the Korean Peninsula, narrows the most critical decision-making windows, and crowds out opportunities for diplomacy. The explicit mention of South Korea’s Strategic Command in the Washington Declaration may indicate the alliance is gearing up to navigate these dilemmas in a more mature manner. The urgency of the environment certainly requires it but also underscores just how fragile the current status quo is on the peninsula.