As US secrets leak helter skelter, South Korea’s president drives Chevy to levy, flies off with more fallout shelter

(Originally published April 28 in “What in the World“) U.S. President Joe Biden, hosting South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in Washington, announced a much more assertive defensive posture for American forces in South Korea that will see nuclear-armed submarines calling periodically at Korean ports and more joint training between the two countries’ militaries.

The announcement was part of a deal, dubbed the Washington Declaration, designed to allay South Korean fears about Pyongyang’s accelerating developing of nuclear weapons. Pyongyang has conducted a record number of missile tests in the past two years, including intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States, submarine-launched missiles and solid-fuel missile rockets that are easier to move around and launch more quickly to avoid detection. Washington’s promise of stepped-up protection includes greater collaboration with Seoul on the use of U.S. nuclear weapons as a deterrent against North Korea and on strategies for using them in the event of conflict.

After North Korean drones snuck into South Korea last December as far as Seoul’s suburbs, South Korea began talking about requesting the U.S. to redeploy nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula, where it removed them in 1991. Seoul also faces calls to start its own nuclear weapons program. Biden’s new deal is meant to keep Seoul from doing that. As explained in this space in January:

The U.S. kept nukes in Korea until the early 1990s, when it withdrew them as part of an arms control treaty with the soon-to-collapse Soviet Union. Seoul can’t develop its own nukes as a signatory to the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. But North Korea, which withdrew from the treaty in 2003, conducted a record number of missile tests last year, even launching an intercontinental ballistic missile and Washington has warned that it’s close to conducting a fresh nuclear test.

The last straw for many South Koreans, apparently, came last week when North Korea managed to slip five drones across the demilitarized zone into South Korea, with one even reaching Seoul.

South Korea is already under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, meaning the U.S. would deploy nuclear weapons to defend it if necessary. And South Korea is already protected by some of the best anti-missile systems money can buy, including the Patriot missiles Washington has now promised Ukraine and a Thaad (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system.

On its face, therefore, the new deal seems to do little to improve Seoul’s defense. Port calls by U.S. nuclear submarines don’t mean those same subs weren’t already patrolling Korean waters. The whole point of nuclear subs in the so-called nuclear trinity is that their nuclear propulsion allows them to cart nuclear weapons around undetected. So having the subs pop up in Korean ports reduces their deterrent effect by exposing them to attack.

But Seoul has more leverage over Washington now than it might ordinarily have. Washington has been eager to convince the South Koreans to give some of their considerable stockpile of artillery shells—which defend them against a sudden invasion by their neighbor—to Ukraine to help repel Russia. Koreans were justifiably outraged to learn from the trove of top-secret documents leaked by a U.S. air national guardsman that the U.S. has been spying on South Korea to determine its willingness to support Ukraine, among other things.

So Biden may not have sensed the irony of asking an embarrassed Yoon to sing a verse of Don McLean’s classic 1971 anthem of Vietnam-era disillusionment “American Pie.” Yoon may have felt infantilized by Biden’s creepy attempt at camaraderie, but he arrived in Washington with Washington on the geopolitical backfoot. One must wonder, therefore, whether there’s more to the Washington Declaration than either side may be divulging. Perhaps Seoul has won some participation in the Aegis missile defense system the U.S. is building on Guam or the Resilient Missile Warning Missile Tracking, or RMWMT, network of satellites the U.S. plans to put into orbit about 2,000km above the planet.

Either way, Pyongyang being such a rational geopolitical player, the new measures are certain to dissuade it from its longtime accusations that Washington and Seoul are bent on its destruction. So, we can expect it to roll back the pace of its weapons development and for the risk of confrontation in Korea to fall. Not. North Korea typically uses joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises as a pretext for a new barrage of missile tests. So presumably we can expect to see even more of those, too.

Even as Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives flirt with a disastrous U.S. default by passing a bill to curb U.S. spending in return for raising the debt ceiling, they’re working to accelerate spending on defense. The House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party is preparing measures to slide into the Pentagon’s 2024 budget—already at a proposed record $842 billion—that would speed clearance of a $19 billion backlog of weapons deliveries to Taiwan. Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, said the priority would be to stock up the kind of long-range anti-missile systems wargames have demonstrated the U.S. would quickly run out of.

The U.S. Army, which is already developing land-launched missiles that can hit targets more than 1,000km away—has signed a deal to pay Lockheed Martin $4.8 billion to ramp up production of Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, or Gmlrs, missiles. The Army wants to start getting 14,000 Gmlrs a year, up from 6,000 currently. The Pentagon has been shipping the all-weather Gmlrs to Ukraine along with Himars wheeled missile launchers but hasn’t disclosed how many.