Ryan Vest: Welcome to Horns of a Dilemma, the podcast of the Texas National Security Review at the University of Texas at Austin.

I'm Ryan Vest, Executive Editor of TNSR, and I'm here with our Editor-in-Chief, Sheena Chestnut Greitens.

We're pleased to have joining us today, two distinguished scholars in security studies, Nicholas Anderson and Daryl Press, authors of "Lost Seoul?

Assessing Pyongyang’s Other Deterrent," which is featured in Volume 8, Issue 3 of the journal.

Nick is an assistant professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University, and Daryl is Professor of Government and faculty Director of the Davidson Institute for Global Security at Dartmouth.

Gentlemen, welcome to Horns of a Dilemma.

It's great to have you on the show.

Nick Anderson: Thanks for having us.

Daryl Press: Thank you.

Ryan Vest: Thank you.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: To get us started, I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about your motivation for writing the article.

There's a widespread assumption for as long as I've been going to South Korea, that North Korean artillery capability could be devastating for Seoul at any point should a conflict break out on the Korean Peninsula, and your piece pretty directly challenges that narrative.

But I'm curious how you came to do research on this topic.

What motivated you to even start asking questions about whether that conventional wisdom is true?

Could you tell us about that?

Nick Anderson: Sure.

I'll start with my half of it, because we actually started separately.

This started as a term paper in Barry Posen's legendary US military power class, which I wasn't a student at MIT but I audited the course when I was a fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard.

And I had the same sort of assumption that you did, Sheena, going in that the North Korean artillery is this sort of conventional Trump card, very difficult to deal with if you're South Korea or if you're the US forces in South Korea.

Especially a challenge because of the proximity of Seoul to the border and the population density and the vulnerability.

And so, it started as a paper in the course.

And so I guess the lesson is for any graduate students listening, hang on to your term papers, you never know where they'll end up.

But it started as a paper in the course and, I finished up graduate school and had this draft and found out that Daryl was working on something similar or had been working on something similar.

And so I reached out and we sort of joined forces at that point to conduct the analysis together.

Daryl Press: I would add and say, the paper that we wrote together actually has a double origin in Barry's course in the sense that 25 years before Nick took that course, I took that course, TA'd it for a couple years, and then I just completely stole it.

I ripped it off and I made a complete duplicate carbon copy of that course, which I've been teaching for the past 25 years at Dartmouth.

And one of the papers that undergraduates have been writing.

Over and over year after year is this question assessing the threat of North Korean artillery against Seoul.

And yeah, they found slightly different things.

They set it up different ways, but as I learned more and more about the topic by advising them and mentoring them on this paper, I started moving to the point where I decided I was gonna write on this topic, and that's when I got this email from a graduate student I'd never heard of before.

This peppy, eager Nick Anderson, who had written a terrific first draft and we decided that we'd work on this together.

the paper really starts both from Nick's direction and from my direction, from Barry's class, which has, quite clearly, influenced us both, but also just influenced a generation or two generations of scholars to work on topics like these.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Can I ask a follow up question, which is, why do you think that narrative has been so persistent in policy and media and military circles for such a long time?

What is it that has led people to be convinced that this would be so deadly?

Nick Anderson: I guess I would say a couple of things.

I think , on the one hand, as I mentioned, the vast number of artillery pieces that North Korea has, their proximity to Seoul, Seoul's population density, it seems like this combination that's very kind of deadly basically to put it plainly.

The other thing is that I think there's like a sort of bias that when.

Things like you know, sort of attacks on populated centers have devastating effects.

They tend to be reported more.

They tend to stick in our minds more.

And we sort of remember those, they sort of stand out in terms of, our memory and how we associate the effects of these kinds of weapons.

What we don't think about and don't often notice is that many of these things happen and there's, thankfully no fatalities, no casualties.

And so I think it's a kind of a combination of those two things.

Daryl Press: Yeah, I would just build on that and say the conventional wisdom is so intuitive.

I mean, we all know large caliber artillery is so destructive, and we've all seen pictures from World War II of Stalingrad, or the cities in Germany that were just destroyed some of them by bombing and some of them by conventional artillery.

So I've had the experience that you've had, Sheena, walking around Seoul.

And you can imagine if a few thousand shells fell that are so destructive in this really densely populated space, how could they not kill thousands and thousands of people, tens of thousands of people.

And so the conventional wisdom has this power of just intuition on its side.

And so, I'd say at least the first time I look at it, I don't actually know this from Nick, but the first time I looked at it, my strong assumption was that the conventional wisdom would be roughly correct.

What did you think when you started Nick?

Nick Anderson: Yeah, I, I would say not only.

Was that my assumption, the first draft of this paper that I wrote in, in Barry's class, you sort of reinforced the conventional wisdom because of assumptions I made going in, which maybe we'll talk about later in the conversation.

But because of the assumptions I made going in, in that paper, yeah, the result did mirror the conventional wisdom.

It was sort of tens of thousands, if I remember correctly.

Daryl Press: I gotta say I didn't remember that.

I wasn't, yeah, setting you up there, Nick.

Ryan Vest: So you built a detailed open source model to estimate what an artillery barrage on Seoul might actually look like.

Can you walk us through the basic structure of that model and what our audience needs to understand about your methodology?

Nick Anderson: I'll say that what we're doing in this paper is what's known as military campaign analysis.

That's sort of an approach to understanding hypothetical military operations or military operations that haven't happened, and it's a way to narrow the bounds of uncertainty and get kind of a grasp of how they might go if they happen in practice.

And often what's used is basic math, basic quantitative reasoning along with kind of modeling of military operations in a really kind of basic and abstract way.

So that's what we're doing in the paper.

The model itself is in Microsoft Excel, it's posted on Harvard Dataverse, for those who are interested.

You can go look at it, play with it, these kinds of things.

But it basically has three kind of core components.

The first is the artillery sort of shelling component of the model.

So this is the North Korean artillery forces firing shells into Seoul.

That's piece number one.

And that's the main thing that kind of generates our outcome, our primary outcome of interest in the paper, which is fatalities in Seoul.

The second component of the model is the response by the Combined Forces Command by the US and South Korea.

So they're basically using their artillery.

It's what's known as counter battery fire.

They're using their artillery to strike North Korean artillery that's firing at them.

And then the third component of the model is civil defense in South Korea.

What is the public doing in this moment?

What are the people of Seoul doing, and mainly this is about how quickly they can get to the shelters that are scattered throughout the city.

What this does is drives down the population density over time, right?

People are sort of out on the street and in their homes and in buildings, and they gradually make their way underground.

And this drives down the population density and therefore makes each strike less effective.

Daryl Press: If I were one of your readers listening to Nick talk, my reactions would be number one is, wow, you explained that clearly.

And my second reaction would be, man, I don't think I believe your results at all.

I don't even know what your results are, I don't believe them because you just described a model with three distinct parts—each of which undoubtedly has a bunch of variables underlying these— and it's gonna be sufficiently complex that God knows what you're gonna find in any given circumstance.

And we all know war's unpredictable.

So I'd say, I'm glad you could explain that clearly.

I'm glad you have a nice model, but I'm not sure if I'm gonna believe anything.

What I would say in response is, the thing that led me to think that Nick and I were really onto something, and by onto something I mean that the likely level of fatalities in Seoul would be terrible, but one to two orders of magnitude less than the conventional wisdom.

The reason that led me to think that that's very likely to be true is not the point estimates we reached, but rather the sensitivity analysis and our analysis of how those point estimates change as we vary a wide range of variables.

And the thing that convinced me and I think convinced Nick was when we took our initial results and we ran literally thousands and thousands of simulations to try to figure out how these results that we found varied across a wide range of assumptions.

And the answer is they do vary, but they cluster in a range of between 800 to a thousand dead on the very low end to about 5,000 dead at the high end, and they don't get anywhere near these 20,000, 30,000, a hundred thousand numbers you frequently hear.

So what I would urge your reader to be thinking is that we're not standing up here telling you we know how such a war would go, other than to say it would be chaotic and it would be terrible and it would be a disaster and lots of people would die.

What we are saying is that across a wide range of assumptions and across a wide range of model specifications, that the numbers don't change very much, and they cluster around ranges that are way out of the norm of what you read in the newspaper, what you hear responsible American officials discuss.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: So one of the things that I think is interesting is that your results really are, as you said a minute ago, an order of magnitude or two lower than a lot of the existing estimates.

And that's for a conflict that stays in some ways limited, right?

I think many of our readers probably will have heard the much bigger numbers that relate to a sort of more total war on the peninsula where you commonly will hear the phrase, "a million dead and a billion dollars worth of damage." And so I think to readers, the idea that there's a set of estimates for a more limited conflict that is this much lower is really surprising and interesting.

And I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about that sensitivity analysis, because you're right.

You didn't just run one simulation and you're not reporting the results of just one scenario or one setup that has your favorite set of assumptions, right?

You not only incorporate the ability of the combined forces counter battery weapons and the ability of Seoul residents to seek shelter, but you also identify three different types of conflict scenario that you run these simulations in, right?

There's a surprise scenario, a crisis scenario, and then a preemption scenario.

When I picture conflict on the Korean peninsula, these different scenarios kind of help me lay out in my mind how we get into a conflict and therefore what it is that you're actually measuring when you look at the impact of North Korean artillery.

So can you tell us a little bit about how you developed those three scenarios and how much they matter for your model?

Nick Anderson: Yeah, sure.

So as you said, Sheena, there's three basic scenarios that we envision: surprise, crisis, and preemption.

The surprise scenario is one in which sort of out of the blue the North Koreans unleash masses of amounts of artillery on Seoul with sort of no warning and no sort of expectation that this is going to occur.

Not the most plausible, maybe not the most realistic scenario, but one that does kind of come up in policy discussion and concern.

And so we wanted to sort of try it out.

The main thing that differs here is like how much time we wait until the US and ROK start responding.

That's like the big difference in terms of model terms.

That's how that differs.

So that's the sort of first scenario.

Second scenario is crisis.

This is probably in many ways the kind of most realistic scenario.

This is a case in which we imagine there's some sort of intense crisis happening.

Both sides are sort of expecting that violence may break out at any moment.

And so in this case, South Koreans and the United States are ready to respond, and so they respond much more quickly than in the first scenario.

Third scenario is preemption.

This is a scenario in which we envision there's an expectation on the part of the ROK Army and the US that North Korea is getting ready to launch some sort of attack using its artillery.

And the South Koreans and the US collectively decide to preempt and to attack first.

And they do so not just with counter battery fire, but also with strikes from naval platforms and from air platforms.

So those are the three basic scenarios, as you said, each one we look at in two different kind of versions.

There's the nominal version, which makes the assumption that the North Koreans perform effectively as fast as their weapons will allow them to.

So they're sort of like a normal military or a pretty adept military that kind of goes through the cycle of setting up, firing, breaking down, and relocating and reloading, and then going through that cycle again.

So that's the sort of nominal scenario.

We also have what we consider to be a more realistic scenario, where it's like, not necessarily the most adept military, everything takes them a little bit longer.

Their munitions don't detonate all the time.

Which we know in practice is a fact.

We've seen this in many cases when North Korea uses artillery.

So those are the sort of six basic scenarios that we present in our main results.

And just to kind of put it on the table so listeners can understand, the estimated fatalities across these six scenarios is, on the low end, roughly 700.

And that's the sort of realistic preemption scenario.

And then on the very high end, roughly 4,600, and that's the surprise nominal scenario.

Daryl Press: Again, from a listener standpoint, they might say, well, you have no idea how a war's gonna start.

You have no idea what's gonna come beforehand.

And we would say, you're exactly right, nobody does.

And so what Nick just described is kind of our method for, I don't wanna say throwing the kitchen sink at it, but just trying to conceive the wide range of ways this thing could kick off and what that might mean for the lag in response time before South Korea and the United States start responding.

And as he just described, we do as you would expect, generate a significant range of results from, I think he just said, 750 fatalities to 4,500 or 4,800 fatalities.

And that's reassuring to me that the model did what it should have done.

But on the other hand, while that is terrible —while that is a hundred or 200 times worse than what Tel Aviv is experiencing right now, so it's terrible — at the same time, it's nothing compared to the "North Korea can destroy South Korea with conventional forces," concern that is just repeatedly asserted as kind of an end of the conversation observation about the military balance on the Korean Peninsula.

What we found is, yes, there are problems on the Korean peninsula.

But this is not the gravest one.

Nick Anderson: I will just say one more thing, Sheena, 'cause you had asked initially about the sensitivity analysis.

So just to also make sure listeners know what we did here.

Basically the model has a whole bunch of inputs in the Excel model, which people can see if they go and look at it.

For sensitivity analysis, we did two basic things.

One was take every single kind of key input variable in the model and shift it from its lowest plausible value to its highest plausible value to get a sense of what that does to outcomes.

This was an effort to just see, do our results rest really heavily on any individual key variables.

And the answer is that some are more influential than others, but none of them shift it to anything like the expectation of the conventional wisdom.

The other thing we did was simulations.

What we did in these cases was not change one variable at a time, but change all variables at once.

Microsoft Excel allows you to define ranges for each variable.

Randomly select a value from that range, plug it into the model for all of them, run the model, save the results.

And it does that 10,000 times for each version.

And what that gives us is this very broad range of potential outcomes.

And it allows us to see are there unusual combinations of inputs here that would give us extreme outcomes.

So, like you could imagine a day where North Korea has more artillery ready than we expect, more of their munitions detonate than we expect, the US and ROK forces take longer to respond.

So that's one version.

And we can see that in the simulation data or on the opposite end the North Koreans munitions are not detonating at a regular rate.

They're much lower, and so on and so forth.

So the point of the simulations is to give you that broad range of what are the sort of extreme versions of this that we can imagine based on things that we can't conceive of easily, but the computer allows us to do for us.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Can I follow up on one other factor that seems like it might be important or that you identify actually as being important in your results, and that's just that Seoul's ability to protect its citizens, to get them to shelter quickly seems to be an important factor in the ranges that your models generate.

And so I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about what's the story there and how much of a difference does the effort that Seoul has put into civil defense make?

Daryl Press: Yeah.

If I jumped in on this, I think at the core there are three reasons that the model turns up that our answers are so different than everyone else's, and two of them are about what you just said, Sheena, about, in a way, Seoul's ability to protect its civilians.

One of them is, and it's the one that's most general and applies all around the world, is that cities in general protect their civilians pretty darn well.

That when we think about the large destructive radius of artillery shells or aerial drop bombs, we kind of think about them in a forest or think about them in an open field, but dense cities are basically jungles of reinforced concrete.

They're filled with cars and walls and all sorts of things that deflect pressure waves and absorb shrapnel.

And so one of the shocking things we found, not even from the model, but from the historical research we did on historical cases in which people used aerial bombs or artillery against civilians in cities, is that you actually had to use on average multiple artillery shells to kill a single person in a city.

And it's simply because cities protect people.

And so that's kind of result number one.

I have to say.

It's a result which we're seeing play out again in the Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israeli cities.

So answer number one is what we discovered is cities just are a hard place to kill lots of civilians with high explosives.

Number two is, as you articulated, Seoul in particular, because they face this threat, has gone to great lengths to try to protect its people from these kinds of attacks.

And there are lots and lots of shelters all over the city.

There's a metro line which provides shelter to people who are anywhere near it on the surface of the streets.

And then even tall buildings.

You know, the interior stairwells of tall buildings are almost always, they're basically vertical shelters made up of reinforced concrete, and they're a terrific place to be if you're in a disastrous situation like this.

So Seoul's development of civil defense capabilities and civil defense plans also have greatly reduced the vulnerability of its people.

Even though the people understandably don't always take so seriously the actual alarms, once the weapons start detonating, they quickly will.

The last thing is the South Korean government, the South Korean military gets a lot of credit, which is they've been spending a great deal of time and a great deal of money working this problem and working this problem by buying the kinds of artillery systems that are designed to do counter battery fire, to buy the radar systems to exercise the command and control techniques.

Make no mistake, this is something that they need to keep working on.

This is something that is very, very difficult to execute.

And the more they take seriously that job, the more lives they will save in Seoul.

But I really think it's those three things put together: it's the inherent protection provided by cities, it's the civil defense preparations that South Korea has made, and it's the serious investment in the kind of artillery and air systems that would be necessary for a counter battery fire.

That's why our results are one to two orders of magnitude less than everybody else's.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: So you mentioned what's happening in the Middle East right now, and so I can't resist asking for your thoughts on this, even though it's a little bit outside the scope of your article on the Korean Peninsula.

But for listeners, we are recording this in mid-June of 2025, at a moment when conflict between Israel and Iran has sharply escalated, and we have seen the implication of the kinds of attacks that may be similar to the things that your article examines.

And so I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about your thinking about, is the contemporary conflict and the exchange between Israel and Iran that we're seeing today the kind of thing that we can draw lessons from your article to help us understand what we're seeing in the Middle East today, or is it just too different?

How should we think about your results in light of what's going on today in the Middle East?

Daryl Press: I think the horrible conflict going on right now between Israel and Iran really highlights in a way our two main findings as opposed to the implications.

Finding number one is, we have better data, I think as of June 17th on both the number of attacks on Israeli cities than we do on the number of attacks on Iranian cities.

I think we have better data on the number of fatalities in Israeli cities as well.

So I'll use that as kind of the source of the comparison.

And I would say the two things that come loud and clear from this Iran-Israel exchange, and particularly the Iranian ballistic missile attacks on Israel,

are number one: you don't have to kill that many people to cause a disaster and to cause a situation that there's immense amount of suffering and horror.

And at this point, approximately 20 to 25 Israelis have been killed in these attacks.

And yet I think the Israeli population, though steadfast is reeling a bit and the pictures of Tel Aviv are horrifying.

And so I would just point out that when Nick and I say the attacks on Seoul are not nearly as lethal as one believes, and North Korea does not have nearly as good a capability, killing a thousand people in Seoul would probably mean injuring 5,000 people in Seoul or 10,000, and it would mean causing maybe that billion dollars of damage that you just talked about.

So conclusion number one from what's happening in the Middle East right now with respect to civilian casualties, is even a relatively small number of civilian fatalities might correspond with a complete catastrophe, a complete disaster, and a real shock.

Number two is, once again, you're seeing this weird counterintuitive

finding: that you can set off very large explosives in cities over and over and over again and not kill nearly as many people as one might expect.

At this point in the war, Iran has fired about 350 ballistic missiles at Israel, approximately.

It seems that about 35 of them, roughly, have detonated somewhere in Israel, mostly around urban areas, and with 35 ballistic missiles, they've managed to kill between 20 and 25 people on the ground, less than one person per ballistic missile.

And to compare this to the North Korea case, I'd point out that each of these ballistic missiles has about 500 kilogram-size whereas the very large yield guns that North Korea would be firing have about seven kilograms of explosive.

So it's a difference of a function of 70.

Now, because lethality and conventional explosives generally increases with the cube root.

70 times the explosive is usually about four times the lethal radius, or 16 times the lethal area.

But basically, it falls eerily into these exact ranges that Nick and I found from the historical data.

So to me, what's striking from this is A: make no mistake there's a war on the Korean peninsula and North Korea does this to South Korea, this is a terrible war crime.

It's a catastrophe for South Korea, and we should be thinking and praying and caring about our friends and loved ones in Seoul 'cause it's a disaster.

But also make no mistake that North Korea doesn't have either a war-winning or a stalemating weapon, and in fact, the greatest thing that we should all be worried about, besides the fatalities in Seoul, is that if North Korea ever makes this disastrous mistake, that in reality it's their military, including their artillery, which is likely to crumble almost immediately.

And the question we should always be worried about is, and then what?

What's North Korea's next move?

Ryan Vest: So with the model, you've come up with these ranges of casualties, and as we talked about what's going on in Iran and Israel today, this really kind of stood out to me that you came up with on the low end, around 700 for a preemptive strike versus closer to 5,000 for an unprepared strike.

Based on what we've seen, what kind of lessons should policymakers draw from both what they're seeing in the Middle East now, but really from your article, when they look at these differences in numbers?

Certainly any loss of life is horrific, but 700 is a whole lot better than 4,700.

Is that something that they should be thinking about?

Nick Anderson: As Daryl has already said, it's important that we don't come across as sort of callous in conducting this kind of research and talking about this number of fatalities.

It is, regardless of any of these numbers, it is horrific.

I think the thing that's most important to kind of take away is, and as we try and sort of emphasize in the introduction of the article: the expectations really are on the order of kind of tens or hundreds of thousands.

And what we're finding is sort of, high hundreds to low thousands.

And we've even made quite a few sort of pretty conservative, pretty sort of, North Korea-favorable assumptions going in to sort of stack the deck a little bit against our arguments.

And even then the findings are pretty low.

So there's a number of implications that come from the project and I'll talk about the first couple and, I'll let Daryl talk about some of the other ones.

The first, and I think important one is that the US and the ROK's ability to protect Seoul is greater than we've commonly thought.

They've made the right investments, they're sort of training with the right materials, their militaries have developed to a point where this is a problem that is manageable— difficult, requires a lot of commitment— but is ultimately a manageable problem.

And so the kind of, defeatism that I think has defined a lot of the discussion around the artillery threat to Seoul is maybe unwarranted, or less warranted than many have thought.

Second important implication is that , if we are correct and if the North Koreans know this, they should be deterred from engaging in this kind of behavior.

They should be much less likely to engage in a massive artillery bombardment of the South.

And this is also great news, right, for the United States and South Korea?

Conventional deterrence will kind of help keep the peace.

And I think that's a second, positive implication of the research.

Daryl Press: Nick always does this.

Nick always gives the good news story and then he leaves me with the bad news story, but fair enough.

I do think there's also two worrisome conclusions that come from this.

And, The first one is that if there is a crisis, if there's a serious crisis and it looks like war hangs in the balance, we will have all, of course all be hoping that war can be avoided, that there'll be a way for the diplomats to find a way out of the conflict, but South Korea and US military leaders and political leaders will know that if we were to strike first, rather than waiting for North Korea to cross over the threshold, that we could probably reduce the subsequent fatalities in South Korea by maybe a factor of four.

What was it, about 750 to a couple thousand.

And so they're gonna be stuck with this really nasty dilemma where on one hand they want to see peace, but on the other hand, if it looks like war is likely, they want to go first.

And as we know from history, those kinds of dynamics sometimes lead to a war, which in retrospect could have been avoided.

And so the preemption story itself is a mixture of good news and bad news: good news that there's another tool, another arrow in the quiver that could reduce further losses to South Korea.

The bad news is that might be the useful tool that gets us into a war that none of us want.

The other piece of bad news is the overarching argument here that we're making is in our minds, not just about the artillery balance in Korea, but really about the balance of power in Korea.

And as Nick kind of suggested earlier, experts who've watched the Korea for years have known that the North Korean military in general is not what it appears.

It's a lot weaker.

It poses a much lower threat than it appears on paper because it's equipment is old, it doesn't train very much, et cetera.

But North Korea's two Trump cards have always been the artillery and the threat in Seoul and the nuclear weapons.

And what we're basically finding is that that artillery is as much of a paper tiger as the rest of the conventional North Korean military.

And as a result, if God forbid, we find ourselves in a serious war on the Korean peninsula, very soon into that war, the leaders in Pyongyang are likely to see a conventional military force of theirs that's collapsing, an artillery force that's been disarmed, and they're gonna have the nasty choice of either accepting the fate that Saddam Hussein faced, or being pressured to find some way of escalating and coercing an end to the war with nuclear weapons.

And so, like all these things, there's good news, there's bad news, and they're often intertwined.

North Korea's profound weakness, not only in its main conventional forces, but also in its conventional artillery is good news.

The alternative would be worse news.

But do understand that with that good news comes with quite serious pressures on North Korea to escalate to the nuclear level, should war come.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: You know, one of the things that I think is really important about this article is that it identifies a set of risks that are just different from what the conventional wisdom commonly focuses on.

And this is one of the things that I really liked the first time I read this piece, and one of the reasons why we thought it was important, and we're glad to have the chance to publish it in the Texas National Security Review is that, I don't in any way in reading the article or listening to you talk about this, take away that you're cavalier about the costs of an artillery exchange between the two Koreas.

It's much more that actually most people in hearing, well, the North Korean military is conventionally weaker than outside analysts think would think, wow, that's great.

That's great news.

And, there is a part of that that's good, although having interviewed some former members of the North Korean military who were hungry during their military service, there's also real human cost that sort of undergirds that military weakness that has its own just sort of human level tragedy and cost to it.

But, what I think is really important is this part that you're emphasizing now, which is that something that we might regard as a positive, North Korea's conventional military being weak and less able to threaten Seoul or the citizens of South Korea, American residents, or international residents of South Korea than we might think— that all sounds good— but there's a set of risks even to the good news, right?

North Korea in the past couple years has for the first time explicitly laid out conditions under which it might use nuclear weapons first.

And so, one of the things that I really appreciate is the tying in of this conventional threat, the artillery risks and costs of an artillery exchange with the risks of nuclear escalation on a peninsula that has long been one of the world's most serious flashpoints, so I guess I wanted to ask if there's one thing or a few things that you wanted policymakers to take away from this article?

What would you want them to walk away knowing or taking back to their teams to think about and work on?

Nick Anderson: I'll take a stab at that first.

So I think probably if there's kind of one overarching, policy relevant finding of the article, it's that the North Korean conventional military is weaker in all of its aspects than we have thought.

And I think a lot of that has been understood, but artillery has stood out as this part that was particularly strong or threatening still, and we're finding that's no longer the case.

And if that's true, then a lot of what we're seeing, in terms of what North Korea is doing maybe makes more sense, right?

The sort of doubling down on the nuclear capability under Kim Jong-Un.

It's really taken off since he took power in the 2010s, and as you said, this change in North Korea's doctrine in 2022 to allow the first use of nuclear weapons— maybe they would've done that anyway— but now it's out there.

It's sort of explicit in cases where the regime or leadership is threatened.

Trading away millions of artillery shells to Russia in Ukraine in exchange, as far as we understand, for technology that will aid the nuclear program, pushing really, really hard towards, an ICBM capability and the ability to strike the continental United States.

All of this makes a little bit more sense if you understand that they don't have as strong a conventional deterrent as we thought.

And so, going forward, I think North Korea is gonna just be in more situations in which it will rely more heavily on nuclear weapons.

Hopefully that doesn't include use, but sort of this is like in some ways the kind of last leg.

And if that's true, the odds of them abandoning this, as long as relations remain as they are now are very, very low.

The expectation that they may give these up someday for some sort of deal or grand bargain, I think the results of our research suggests that that's unlikely to happen.

Daryl Press: I agree with everything Nick just said.

I would add two things.

If I was thinking, what are the two flashing red to-dos that come out of our research for policymakers?

I'd say the first one is largely for South Korean audience, for South Korean military audience in particular, which is to say your society has already done the hard part.

Your society has already found the money and found the will to buy the weapon systems that are necessary for you to do this really difficult thing, namely protect Seoul, which is nestled right up next to the North Korean border, and yet you now have the equipment to do it, but the equipment is part one.

Because the mission is really difficult.

It's about rapidly identifying incoming shells.

It's figuring out the origin of those shells, distributing targets in a chaotic environment very quickly to shooters targeting, doing bomb damage assessment.

None of that is simple, and especially in the chaos of war, that therefore what South Korea really has to do now is double down and triple down in the training, and kind of the soft work that has to happen underneath this— about trying to practice doing this in a chaotic, difficult circumstance and getting as good as you possibly can because they have to succeed the first time.

And so I'd say the first thing is congratulations.

South Korea's bought the stuff that will let them defend Seoul.

Now they have to do the hard work of actually preparing to execute a difficult mission.

The second thing is a takeaway both for US and South Korean leaders, leaders at the political level, leaders at the military level, which is this challenge of intra war deterrence.

In Ukraine we're wrestling with how much can we push back Russia in territory they've seized before you start getting toward Russian red lines and there are views all over the map about this and big debates.

On the Korean Peninsula, it might be much, much quicker and much, much more dire, which is if things go the way that Nick and I expect.

If there is, God forbid, a major conventional war in the Korean peninsula, we really do not think the North Korean military is gonna survive as a functioning force for, I don't know, more than a week, 10 days.

And very rapidly, the North Korean government is gonna be facing life and death decisions about how they make us stop, and they don't have a whole lot of tools other than nuclear weapons.

So I think what this means for US and South Korean leaders is we have to be thinking really, really hard now about A: how we're gonna fight that conventional war.

Sure, defend Seoul from incoming artillery.

What are the things in our normal military toolkit that we are gonna do and not gonna do for the purpose of preventing escalation?

How are we gonna message that war?

What are we gonna be telling North Korean leaders and other observers real-time about what our objectives are and are not?

And fundamentally, how we're gonna come to grips, not just as the United States, but as an alliance with how much damage we want to inflict and how much success we want to achieve in this war to balance the operational objective of defending South Korea and thwarting an attack, and the strategic objective of all of us getting out of this war without a significant nuclear exchange.

And so I think both the training, training, training conventional job is really job one for the South Korean army today.

And the thinking about intra war escalation is job number one for strategists at the US strategic command, at CFC, at USFK and in the South Korean military and leadership.

And they are flashing red topics of just as great importance as the dangers we face in the Taiwan Strait or in Eastern Europe, or now in the Middle East.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: I found that point actually really striking.

I'm glad you brought up the compression of time that decision makers will have to think about these escalation risks.

And that intra war deterrence aspect when it's compressed in time, I think could be, as you said, a flashing red light.

So I'm glad you brought that in, and I'm glad you phrased it that way.

Daryl Press: That's great, and hey, I don't know if this belongs in this podcast or not, but it is so nice have TNSR and its particular voice in terms of the topics that it covers as an outlet for not just Nick and me, but for our community, all of us, and to be a place that's open to publishing campaign analyses.

I mean, there aren't very many places out there that see this as an important part of either foreign policy analysis or scholarly research.

And so, having TNSR as a place who sees the importance and the contributions of that style of work is a tremendous benefit to the field.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Well, I think your article's a great example of why we at TNSR find it valuable and why we wanted to put it out there as a contribution for the security studies scholarly community, but also for the American and international strategy community and the community that thinks about these risks and these problems on a daily basis as professionals and as practitioners, so we're really delighted to have you both on.

Thanks so much for joining us today to talk about your article.

Congrats on having it out and, again, really pleased to feature it in TNSR.

Thanks for being with us today.

Nick Anderson: Thanks for having us.

Daryl Press: Thank you.

Ryan Vest: Thanks for joining us on Horns of a Dilemma from the Texas National Security Review.

Our guests today have been Nicholas Anderson and Daryl Press,

authors of "Lost Seoul: Assessing Pyongyang's Other Deterrent," which as always can be accessed for free on our website, tnsr.org.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen.

You can find more of our work at tnsr.org and in the show notes.

Today's episode was produced by TNSR Digital and Technical Manager Jordan Morning and made possible by The University of Texas System.

This is Ryan Vest and Sheena Chestnut Greitens.

Thanks for listening.