Why some experts fear S. Korean missile sites could incentivize N. Korean strikes

South Korea’s military appears to have deployed more than 300 short-range ballistic missiles in fixed concrete bunkers near Seoul, an arrangement that suggests it could be used as a first-strike weapon against North Korea, two U.S. security analysts have assessed. But some South Korean experts contend that the missile bases are aimed at rapidly responding to a North Korean attack rather than preemptive strikes, highlighting a debate about how the two Koreas’ development of increasingly precise missile systems exacerbates escalation risks. According to a study published in Survival, a bimonthly journal by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the three South Korean sites for the fixed concrete blockhouses in Gyeonggi Province collectively field 38 launch bays capable of housing up to 304 Korean Tactical Surface-to-Surface Missiles (KTSSM). The study was written by Decker Eveleth, an associate research analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, and Jeffrey Lewis, a scholar of global security at Middlebury College. The authors geolocated the sites after the Joint Chie

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