South Korea’s Missile Arsenal Expands

Jeffrey Lewis 0:01

And be like, oh, wow, we're creating a World War I-like scenario where everybody feels the need to go first. We should probably put the brakes on that. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:28

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East. Hey, Aaron. Yeah.

Jeffrey 0:36

We have a sponsor. We have another sponsor? Yeah, the Henry Miller Library, the beloved Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. You know, they've had a hard time because Big Sur has been cut off from the world because of the landslide, and they're just picking up the pieces, and they're going to have a fundraiser benefit in New York.

Aaron 0:57

Oh, really? Yeah.

Jeffrey 0:58

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're in New York at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn on November 19th at 7.30 p.m., there is a play to benefit the Henry Miller Library. It's called Dear Elizabeth. And it's a play based on letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. And you can go ahead and you can find a link to buy tickets there.

Through the Henry Miller website, the Henry Miller Library website, which is henrymiller.org.

Aaron 1:36

And it's helping a local cause, so go on and check it out. Maybe we'll have a link down there in the show notes too.

Jeffrey 1:41

Yeah, we love the Henry Miller Library here in Northern California. Also, by the way, who doesn't love Henry Miller and dirty books?

Aaron 1:49

That's right, that's right. Speaking of dirty books.

Jeffrey 1:53

Dirty books! Dirty Missile Guidelines.

Aaron 1:55

Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey 1:59

Big weekend. The Orange Julius Caesar went to South Korea.

Aaron 2:05

As part of his 13-day trip to the Asia-Pacific region.

Jeffrey 2:09

Yep, yep, yep. He made it to Korea, did not make it to the DMZ, was turned back by fog, but while he was in Seoul, and I'm reading from the White House joint press release with the Republic of Korea, President Trump acknowledged the Republic of Korea's adoption of its revised missile guidelines in 2017 to remove payload restrictions on Republic of Korea ballistic missiles to combat the nature of the North Korean threat.

So the U.S. is dropping the payload restriction on South Korea's ballistic missiles.

Aaron 2:41

This is a bigly deal. I mean, this has been an iterative process, and I think we're at the end of a long road here.

Jeffrey 2:48

Yeah, you know, I think we've talked a fair amount about South Korea's missiles on the podcast, but they don't get talked about at all in the public eye. In the public discourse, the the notion that South Korea has a very capable missile force almost never comes up. And yet there has been yet another another revision of the missile guidelines, which I think gets us to the point where there are approximately no important restrictions left on their missile programs.

Aaron 3:20

Yeah, I think that's the big news. But I think it's important to back up and tell people what the guidelines are and then what the reasons they were there. And then as we've moved forward, what it means that they've been taken off, more or less.

Jeffrey 3:34

Right. So in the late 1970s, South Korea had a program to develop a nuclear weapon and a long range ballistic missile to deliver that nuclear weapon. As one does. As one does. As one does. Under the Park dictatorship, Park Chung-hee was the military dictator of South Korea. His daughter is the recently impeached President Park. She was actually the first lady during this period because the North Koreans shot her mother in the head.

As one does. Certainly as one does. In fact, not long after the missile guidelines were agreed in 1979, the head of the KCIA would shoot her daddy in the face, too. Well, we're seeing a pattern here. But anyways, just to get off the morbid. At least it's better than VX, right? Not my fault. Well, that was actually an internal.

That was the KCIA. That was one of his friends shot. Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of that going around. Anyway, so at that time, the United States was, under the Carter administration, considering removing U.S. ground troops from South Korea, which was pretty politically controversial in the United States. And in order to... Basically, that process bogged down, and one of the things the U.S. wrangled out of the South Koreans in exchange for keeping the troops and also shutting down the nuclear program was the South Koreans agreed to shut down the nuclear program, and they agreed to limit the range of ballistic missiles that they would develop, and that was initially capped.

180 kilometers. And the U.S. provided assistance to the South Koreans who modified Nike Hercules surface-to-air missiles and put them in a surface-to-surface missile role in something which gets called the NHK-1. That's Nike Hercules Korea, although the South Koreans call it the Hunmu. And so that's where the missile guidelines came from.

Aaron 5:43

Yeah, and then, I mean, this stuck around the guidelines until concurrent pressure again from the North Koreans in the 1980s allowed for, again, modification of these guidelines.

Jeffrey 5:56

Yeah, that's right. And I think the important thing to say is they aren't really an agreement. I mean, I sometimes see people call it a bilateral agreement. I've never actually been able to track down a copy of the guidelines. And I've been told that basically it was just a letter from the United States. I think it was a letter from the commander of U.S. forces, Korea, actually, just basically telling the South Koreans that we were prepared to assist them.

In various ways, but that they could not develop missiles that could carry a 500 kilogram payload more than 180 kilometers and imposing a whole bunch of other transparency requirements on them. And as you say, that's changed over the years. So the Clinton administration made a deal with the South Koreans. The South Koreans came into the MTCR and the Clinton administration upped the range to 300 kilometers.

And then the Obama administration, because Barry loved President Park's predecessor, Iman Bak, they agreed to up the range further to 800 kilometers. But those were always capped with a 500 kilogram payload.

Aaron 7:11

Right, and that's important because the weight, because if you lessen the weight, you can obviously fly farther. Right.

Jeffrey 7:19

Right. And so the South Koreans this year wanted to go up to a thousand kilogram payload and they announced that they were doing that. And now the Trump administration has just sort of basically said that there's no payload limit. So in theory, you could build any range missile you want and you just, you know, assert that the payload is so big that it gets down under the guidelines.

So basically, I think we're at the We're kind of at the end of the guidelines. It's an interesting question whether they've run their course or not. I mean, we've seen South Korea develop an increasingly capable series of missiles. So, you know, it's no longer the NHK-1. They've developed a series of much more capable solid-fueled ballistic missiles. And they have a really long-range cruise missile, which has a range of 1,500 kilometers.

Aaron 8:09

And they like to show that one off flying through concrete bunkers that look a lot like the palace that Kim Jong-un likes to hang out in Pyongyang.

Jeffrey 8:17

Yeah. And I think that gets to, you know, the stated reason for going up to a thousand kilograms is they want a really big payload because they have this plan at the beginning of a war, which they call the what is the Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation Plan, which isn't as best I can tell retaliation. It's a preemptive plan.

And it's the idea that if the North Koreans are about to launch a missile strike, they're The South Koreans are going to try to kill Kim Jong-un. They're going to hit the North Korean leadership with everything they got. And that's going to be stuff that's long-range, but it's also going to be stuff with larger warheads. And I think we've seen lately they've shown off maneuvering warheads for the Hunmu series of ballistic missiles.

And as you say, they have this lovely tendency to— To fly the missiles into targets that look like places in Pyongyang, just so the North Koreans get the message.

Aaron 9:11

Yeah, I mean, they want everybody to know what their intention is. And, you know, that makes sense, right? I mean, from their perspective is that you want to have the capability, even at the conventional level, to have increased certainty that at the start of any potential conflict, you would be able to try and decapitate leadership, right?

Jeffrey 9:30

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, this ultimately gets to this bigger question of what the North Korean and South Korean missile programs are and what challenges they pose. Because, you know, the point of the bilateral agreement in the 1970s was to allow the South Koreans to develop a reasonable conventional missile capability that was not part of a nuclear weapons program.

And I think if we're being... Honest about it, and we look at the South Korean system now... I don't think anybody believes the increasingly capable series of Hunmu ballistic and cruise missiles are for nuclear weapons. They are going to be conventionally armed. And so the original rationale for the guidelines has disappeared. And so I do understand why it's hard to look at the South Koreans and say, no, you can't have this particular missile system you want.

Aaron 10:29

But then there is this other piece, which is, you know, we do kind of have to look at it and ask, you know, like,

Jeffrey 10:36

Even if we're sympathetic to the, the desires of the South Koreans to defend themselves, we're in this together and we have to ask whether this particular plan to defend themselves is a, is a good or stabilizing one.

Aaron 10:54

Yeah. And, Let me ask you about this, because it gets back to this stability question, is that one thing that came out of at least the news reporting about Trump's visit to South Korea was this idea of collaboration on nuclear-powered submarines as well. And could you see something along the lines of conventional cruise missiles and nuclear-powered submarines in South Korea?

And how does this fit into this destabilization thing that you just talked about?

Jeffrey 11:20

Yes.

Aaron 11:21

I teed you up there, didn't I?

Jeffrey 11:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess the first thing I would say is we should keep in mind that the ballistic missile capability we're talking about in South Korea is real and extant now. I mean, often when we talk about South Korea's missile capabilities, people are like, oh, they're going to build them. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no.

They have built them, right?

Aaron 11:43

And they show them off every time there's a North Korean test. They show off the missile.

Jeffrey 11:49

That's right. There's an Army Missile Command with a headquarters that we've identified. There are a number of missile bases around the country that we've identified. They're, for whatever reason, not in the open literature, but we can see them. We estimate the size of the force at something like 60, 70 missile launchers with probably a much larger number of conventional missiles.

They increasingly show them off in tests. We've been watching the tests out of the missile test range. We had a lot of fun with the barge.

Aaron 12:14

Yeah, the barge. Was that an arms control on post, or was that someplace else?

Jeffrey 12:19

Didn't we talk about it on the pod?

Aaron 12:21

Well, we did talk about it on the pod, but then you had pictures that you put online, which made it easy to follow. We'll find it. Look down at the show notes. We'll find it.

Jeffrey 12:29

And sort of after our recent North Korean missile test, the South Koreans staged their own missile test to show that they had seen the preparations and therefore would have been in a position to preempt. So this is a real capability now. And then on top of that, the South Koreans are talking about nuclear-powered submarines, which I think one thing they discuss is going ahead and parking those submarines outside of North Korean Navy ports.

Which makes sense, again. In order to hunt the North Korean ballistic missile submarines that might come out. But then those systems are also going to have the ability to carry the conventional cruise missile that we already see being launched from vehicles on the ground. And so, you know, South Korea is moving into this position where it's got this very large and increasingly distributed cruise and ballistic missile capability.

And the challenge it poses, right, is that... It makes no sense to use this capability against North Korea's missiles once they are out in the field. It makes a lot of sense to use this capability against North Korea's leadership before they give the order. And so I understand if you sit a military planner down and you say, come up with the best military option to deal with this problem, they're going to come back and say, well, it's preemption.

The challenge is, I think, from a strategic perspective, when you are a politician and you come into this or you're a decision-maker, a policy-maker... You can look at a system that your best military option is actually quite dangerous, right? Your best military option makes a war more likely rather than less likely. And so we've got a tough challenge because, you know, and I've said this before, but I think the North Korean plan is to use their nuclear weapons early in a conflict in order to repel a U.S. invasion.

So they think they're going to go first. And the South Korean plan is to go first against the North Koreans before the North Koreans can go first. Like one of them is wrong about that. And that's, I think, a really escalatory situation to be in.

Aaron 14:51

Yeah, and I think it's important too, is always to point out within this peninsula is distances. And then when you add humans into our theoretical scenarios, the decision-making time is so compressed is that it's hard to really conceptualize or think of This concept that we always have of rationality is that leaders will understand at the outset that the South Korean response is conventional, and if they miss, there is a way to de-escalate the situation.

Whereas with distances and times and the assumption that the North Koreans want to use nuclear weapons early in the conflict, it becomes inherently destabilizing.

Jeffrey 15:31

Right, and one other little piece I want to put down on the table for this conversation is I think we often have these mental models that a conflict, as it unfolds, it's going to be very clear to both sides what's happening.

Aaron 15:48

Yeah, that was what I was trying to say inelegantly, is that nobody will really quite know.

Jeffrey 15:53

And so there's this idea like, oh, well, you know, if we try to kill him and we miss... I mean, he's going to know that it's a limited strike and he's going to have survived. So he probably won't go ahead and then start the nuclear war. And it's like, well, you know, like maybe, but it's also possible that you try to kill him and you miss and he doesn't know that it's stopped.

And that as you were trying to kill him, he gives the order to go ahead and, and, and, you know, let everything go. Or maybe you knock down the communications and so everybody thinks that you've killed him and you've made the wrong calculation about what the missile units are going to do. And they choose to avenge him even though he's not dead.

You know, there are a million ways things can get confused and crazy when you have a situation like this. You know, actually the example I always use, which I talk about morbid, It's like we live in the United States. This is like the capital of mass shootings. You would think we would know by now that initial reports in a situation with an active shooter are often really, really wrong.

Like how often do you see false alarms about active shooters? How often when there is an active shooter do you find out that all the information you've been given in the first, you know, 20 minutes is wrong? Like all the time. And it's going to be exactly the same.

Aaron 17:26

But what I do know is in order to solve mass shootings, we just have to have more guns. And so you can make it... Analysis here is that you just need more weapons in the Korean peninsula, right?

Jeffrey 17:37

Yeah, that's right. That one? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's certainly what the North Koreans think, right? I mean, the North Koreans are the NRA of the geopolitical system.

Aaron 17:46

That's right.

Jeffrey 17:47

You'll pry those missiles from Kim Jong-un's cold, dead hands.

Aaron 17:50

That's right. That's right.

Jeffrey 17:52

Yeah. Yeah. But I do seriously worry about that problem, which is that the South Koreans and the North Koreans both think they're going to go first. And I think we have really unrealistic expectations about how likely these plans are to succeed. Like, they are the best of a series of bad choices. That doesn't mean that they are good choices.

Aaron 18:13

Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably realism amongst the planners about, you know, estimated losses, but nobody wants to let those out because they're so grievous. Maybe, or you could have the Tommy Franks phenomenon. Which one we've talked about Tommy a few times.

Jeffrey 18:27

Well, so, you know, at the beginning of, of, of the Iraqi war, the 2003 Iraqi was Iraqi freedom, right? Yeah. Tommy Franks was the CENTCOM commander, and they thought Saddam was at a place called Dora Farm, and so they started the war a day early with a decapitation strike on Saddam.

Aaron 18:44

Right, exactly. We've mentioned this a lot because it's an important corollary to a theoretical scenario, is that if you can get a shot at him, you get a theoretical shot at him, and tensions are high enough to where conflict is being thought about, is that you have an incentive to go first, which goes back to your initial point, become full circle.

Right. Right. And they miss. And you miss.

Jeffrey 19:06

Yeah. I mean, you miss. Right. Because the intelligence was bad. But what's really funny about that is and he recounts the story in his memoir. So he's like not aware that it's funny is Buzz Mosley, who later became the chief of staff. The Air Force is planning the strike. And Mosley tells him that there's a I think it's a 50 percent chance.

That one of the aircraft will destroy this bunker that they believe is at the site. Turns out there is no bunker. They were going to do a cruise missile strike, but then they had to add an aircraft because they needed to bust this bunker. And then it turns out there is no actual bunker to be busting. And because it was a 50-50 chance is what they estimated it.

Frank says he asks Mosley, like, what does it take to get to 100%? Two airplanes. And Mosley's like, yes, sir. Yeah. You multiply, Buzz. You don't add. But the point being that the people making these calculations can be wrong. Like, Saddam was never there. There was no bunker there. And the... Math that went into the strike planning was probably right at like the planner level.

Like I'm sure the actual people who put it together knew what the hell they were doing. But by the time it filters up to the senior leadership, like people like Franks or, you know, in our scenario, the president, you know, you have people who don't really understand these issues making decisions based on poor approximations of the facts.

Aaron 20:44

But what does 1,000 kilograms get you? I mean, just for the listeners as we wrap up here. I mean, why would they want 1,000? Why is it important to take these limits off and then weave it into this scenario?

Jeffrey 20:56

Well, so I don't actually know. I mean, they seem to imply that 1,000 kilograms is going to do a much better job of busting bunkers. And I I suppose that's true although you know, I mean, it gets to this question of like, what are you actually trying to do when you're trying to dig out a bunker and you know, just sort of digging down and exploding, and it is.

You know, it's easier for the North Koreans just to dig deeper and deeper and deeper. And so I think you see in a lot of U.S. discussions of getting at bunkers with conventional weapons, it's not the size of the missile or the warhead. It's the number of sorties you can mount against it. Like, can you basically dig your way down to it with sortie after sortie after sortie?

But in that case, those things need to be very precise. Yeah. So I'm actually not sure that they're right, that doubling their payload is going to give them a whole lot. You know, they're probably, I would think, better off trying to think about functional defeat of bunkers. Yeah. But I know they also hate those missile guidelines, and eliminating the payload restriction, I think, is a way to basically be out from the guidelines altogether.

And by the way, I should say one more thing is, my observation of the way these missile guidelines have been adopted or updated over the years is that starting with the Clinton administration in the 1990s, the South Koreans went ahead and built or got very close to completing a noncompliant missile. And I think they presented the United States with a fait accompli, like...

So we're going to do this thing and then we're going to be out of compliance with this missile. And you can decide whether you want to go along with that or not.

Aaron 22:51

And in this sense, the North Koreans haven't just been sitting around their provocative actions in the 1990s. And then again, obviously, which keep our bread and butter here on the Art of Control podcast, you know, in more recent years, helps add to their argument about reassurance in the bilateral relationship.

Jeffrey 23:08

Yeah, so, like, what are you going to do, right? The North Koreans have done all this provocative stuff, and then the South Koreans are like, yeah, we're upping the range by 300 kilometers. Are you going to, like, throw a temper tantrum? Yeah. You're not a good ally. I mean, in that sense, they can always hold it over our heads.

It's like, no.

Aaron 23:23

Yeah, exactly. Especially if they're conventional, right?

Jeffrey 23:28

Well, I mean, you know, like, it's nice that we gave them some help early on, but, like, they don't actually need us to build these missiles. Not anymore. So, you know, like, we could send them a sternly worded letter. So, actually, I do understand why the Obama administration relaxed the guidelines. I think my complaint is less about the South Koreans having increasingly longer range conventional missiles and more about how...

Bad of a job we are doing in thinking about how South Korea's evolving posture and our evolving posture and North Korea's evolving posture are all... Pushing us toward a situation where the leaders in a crisis are going to have less and less decision time. I want us to step back from that and be like, oh, wow, we're creating a World War I-like scenario where everybody feels the need to go first.

We should probably put the brakes on that. That's my bigger concern, is a conceptual one. Yeah.

Aaron 24:25

I agree there. And I mean, what more is there to say? I mean, we've talked about this on the podcast multiple times is, is, is putting the brakes, pumping the brakes and stepping back and thinking about the incentive structures in scenario planning for wars, you know, should be questioned assumptions to be questioned. And it's not always too bad to go send a delegation somewhere to Geneva or Switzerland.

I always get into the pod, but how to talk about these things.

Jeffrey 24:52

Yeah. Yeah. I don't think that's a happy note, but I think that's where we're going to end. Yeah, we've got to end. The podcast has got to end someplace.

Aaron 25:01

Yeah, that's right. Here's a happy note. The president's speech, he read the teleprompter. Yeah, he did. Yeah, he read the teleprompter, and it was an okay speech. Yeah.

Jeffrey 25:12

The other happy note is, you know, if you're in New York on November 19th at 7.30 p.m., the theater for a new audience is Polanski Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. Yeah. Is hosting a staged reading of Sarah Rule's Dear Elizabeth. Proceeds benefit the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur. You can get tickets if you just go to henrymiller.org.

Early bird tickets are like 75 bucks. It's not bad. Yeah? You can help what they're calling a renowned cultural institution, what I call our beloved Henry Miller Library.

Aaron 25:51

And it's got dirty books.

Jeffrey 25:54

Henry Miller told some dirty books. My favorite is a story about Gandhi's guy who came to Paris to raise money, but this is a family pod. This is a family pod. Maybe we'll tell it on the Slack channel. Hey, Scott, how are things going over at the Slack channel?

Other voice 26:07

The Slack channel is great as always. And if you would like to join the discussion over at the Arms Control Wong Slack channel, you can kick us $5 a month or $3 a month if you are a student. You can find us over at patreon.com slash acwpodcast.

Jeffrey 26:21

Thanks, Scott. And Aaron, thanks for joining me. Always a pleasure. And thank you for listening.