Two Korean-language-only volumes reveal how Seoul is redefining deterrence and testing the limits of America’s nuclear assurances.

A few months ago, a small group of retired generals, nuclear engineers, and civil-defense scholars met inside a modest policy institute in Seoul. The banner above them read, without flourish, The Korean Nuclear Security Project (한국의 핵안보 프로젝트). On paper, it sounded routine—an audit of deterrence doctrines—yet something about it felt heavier than that.

What began as a government study soon became something else: a manifesto for a country trying to think through what survival might actually mean on its own. It was not ideological, and it was not showy. It grew out of a quieter faith—the idea that if you think hard enough, maybe you can keep disaster at bay. Working without honoraria and running on member dues, the authors spent the summer in what they later called “marathon season”: endless seminars, late-night calls, rewrites over coffee, each round meant to sharpen an argument that no one wanted to say aloud.

The first two volumes, Justification and Implementation Strategy (당위성과 추진 전략) and International Persuasion and Bipartisan Cooperation (국제사회 설득과 초당적 협력), came out in July and August of 2025 mark a subtle but real shift. Seoul no longer treats the American nuclear umbrella as sacred scripture. It is starting to see it as a contract—something to tend, to adjust, and, if needed, to renegotiate. For Washington, long-used to assuming its promises speak for themselves, that might seem like semantics—and maybe it is—but semantics have consequences. Small reinterpretations have a way of growing teeth.

From Dependence to Deliberation

Volume 1 opens with a question that feels half technical, half existential: would North Korea really be unable to use its nuclear weapons? (Vol. 1, ch. 1). The reasoning is brisk but grim—Pyongyang keeps building, while Seoul’s three-axes defense concept rests on preemption theories that could fall apart the first night things go wrong. I have argued before that those assumptions lean more on optimism than on evidence. The authors seem to know that too; they note, almost casually, that alliance credibility—once treated as a constant—now flickers like a variable.

Contributor Song Seung-jong writes that extended deterrence now belongs to the past—a strategic “myth” more invoked than trusted (Vol. 1, ch. 4). The phrase is pointed but not reckless; it captures the unease behind Korea’s new intellectual movement: an alliance that still works mechanically but no longer consoles psychologically.

The ROK Forum for Nuclear Strategy, which coordinates the Project, brought together more than fifty contributors—retired generals, academics, former bureaucrats. Korean media hailed it a “paradigm shift” in strategic thinking. The Forum’s own updates later noted that both volumes reached national bestseller lists in mid-2025—a strange sentence to write about serious defense literature, but it could signal public resonance. When Vol. 2 came out a few weeks later, it felt less like a follow-up than an announcement: this discussion was here to stay.

The shift did not happen in a vacuum. North Korea is pursuing a dual-path strategy—building the tools to nullify the US nuclear umbrella while preparing for a tactical nuclear war. At its latest parade, Pyongyang unveiled the Hwasong-20 intercontinental ballistic missile, a platform capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Seoul and Washington have remained strategically silent, perhaps to deny Kim Jong Un the satisfaction of recognition, but the silence itself increasingly signals something: not just avoidance, but tacit acceptance of a new normal. Meanwhile, the North keeps refining delivery systems for short-range and tactical nuclear weapons, building both deterrent and warfighting capacity.

That context gives the Project’s restraint its edge. The authors never call for a bomb, but their logic operates in a world where the threat keeps mutating. The difference this time isn’t in the conclusion but in the tone. Previous bursts of nuclear debate in Seoul tended to spike after North Korean provocations or U.S. election cycles, then fade. This one moves slowly, bureaucratically—the way real change often does.

And the scope keeps widening. Volumes 3 and 4, expected in 2026, will cover Nuclear Strategy and Command-and-Control Architecture (핵전략과 핵지휘통제체계) and Nuclear Potential and Nuclear Submarines (핵잠재력과 핵잠수함). It is a deliberate progression—the “why,” then the “how,” then the mechanics of deterrence itself. Maybe tidy enough to be deliberate.

And inside those pages, you can almost hear the hum of the bureaucracy translating fear into spreadsheets.

How Bureaucrats Imagine Deterrence

Reading The Project feels, at times, like watching engineers reverse-design Armageddon. Kwon Yong-su, a retired weapons specialist at the Korea National Defense University, traces missile trajectories and counter-force options in clean, detached prose.  It is oddly calming—until you remember what those diagrams are for.

To outsiders, the restraint might look bloodless. But in a country where catastrophe is a daily thought experiment, calm is a coping mechanism. Here, deterrence is no swagger; it is paperwork.

Still, the undertone is hard to miss. South Korea is uneasy beneath the American umbrella and wants a say in how that protection works. That’s not freedom exactly, but it is not dependency either. It is something more awkward, more grown-up.

The Geocentric Mindset and The Parallel

Korean strategists sometimes joke about “Korean Peninsula Geocentrism” (한반도 천동설) — the belief that the world somehow revolves around them. There’s truth in the joke. Seoul wants independence from Washington’s orbit but can’t stop measuring distance from it. The Project tries to challenge that impulse—and ends up mirroring it instead. It tries to move beyond Washington’s orbit but can’t quite stop glancing back to see where the center is.

You can spot this tension at the top. In October 2025, South Korea’s defense minister remarked that U.S. troops on the peninsula should focus on deterring North Korea, not China, since alliance resources must remain “dedicated to the immediate threat.” It sounded reasonable in Seoul, a bit provincial in Washington. But the comment captured a truth: for most Koreans, the global balance of power is still drawn through Pyongyang.

The same gravity shows up in civilian writing—a parallel conversation runs outside the bureaucracy. In We Don’t Know America (우리는 미국을 모른다), journalist Kim Dong-hyun, once a Pentagon-accredited correspondent, argues that Korean elites often misread Washington—treating its pauses as purpose and its politics as grand design. His tone echoes The Project: one speaks through policy charts, the other through social critique. Both describe a nation trying to outgrow dependence, if a little unevenly.

Every alliance tells a story about who protects whom. In Seoul’s version, the fear isn’t abandonment so much as misunderstanding.

Alliance in Search of Reassurance

For American officials, these volumes should feel less like a warning and more like a mirror. They show what the alliance looks like from below the umbrella. Washington still interprets Korean nuclear debate through the old non-proliferation lens, as though every discussion is secretly about control. It is not. The domino metaphor doesn’t land when you’re the piece that’s been shaking for years.

South Koreans now talk about reassurance gaps, delayed signals, and the strange psychology of being defended by someone who isn’t really there.  When I sat in those inter-agency rooms, we called that “alliance management.” Looking back, that phrase feels a little off, as if we were maintaining a machine that, in truth, was a relationship needing care.

South Korea is wavering under American protection and wants a say in how protection works. That’s not freedom exactly, but it is not dependency either. It is something more awkward, more grown-up.

Washington, for its part, seems consumed by the China problem and doesn’t have much bandwidth for anything else. But turning a blind eye to an ally’s security anxieties won’t make them fade. Seoul’s new nuclear discourse is not a tantrum; it is a reckoning. It may even be a test of whether reassurance can survive abstraction.

The Strategic Moment

The Korean Nuclear Security Project is not radical. It is incremental, patient, the kind of work that accumulates under fluorescent light. But it adds up to something: a declaration that strategic adulthood can’t be delegated forever. Published in Korean only, aimed at a domestic audience, the books weren’t written for Western applause—and that’s exactly why they matter.

That foresight has just become tangible. In late October 2025, Washington formally gave Seoul the green light to pursue nuclear-powered submarines, a policy long debated within the Project’s pages. During a summit in Gyeongju, President Donald Trump approved South Korea’s request to begin developing a nuclear-propelled fleet—a move Seoul argues is about endurance, not escalation. The decision marks the first time Washington has publicly endorsed such a capability for an ally outside the United Kingdom.

The symbolism was unmistakable. The ROK Forum’s first volume devotes two chapters to arguing for a nuclear-powered submarine, and the forthcoming fourth volume, Nuclear Potential and Nuclear Submarines (핵잠재력과 핵잠수함), seems to forecast precisely this scenario—a step beyond dependency, toward a form of self-sustaining deterrence under the alliance umbrella. The US decision effectively turns the Project’s logic into policy almost without debate.

South Korean officials framed the move as a way to enhance underwater endurance and tracking capabilities, not to “arm submarines with nuclear weapons.” Yet for Pyongyang—already developing its own nuclear-powered vessel with Russian technical assistance—the optics are unmistakable. The duel now extends beneath the sea: a contest of persistence, patience, and political will.

The hurdles ahead remain steep. Technology transfer restrictions, high costs, and long lead times could delay deployment by a decade or more. Still, the gesture alone shifts the conversation. What began as an academic blueprint for autonomy is now the scaffolding of real policy.

Somewhere between analysis and anxiety, Seoul is teaching itself to think like a guarantor. The warning is already in print, in Hangul. Whether Washington bothers to read it, or waits for the translation, may decide who writes the next chapter of East Asia’s nuclear story.

I keep circling back to one quiet thought: deterrence, for all its theories and charts, is still about trust—and trust, once doubted, never really comes back.