Debating Korean Peninsula Missile Defense | Eric Gomez, Cato Institute | Public Forum

welcome to the night’s debate webinar sorry I think we might have had a little bit of an audio problem but just to explain a little bit about how tonight is going to go I am going to pop on right like I’m doing right now and I am going to explain a little bit about what tonight is all about and how you can use our debate webinar platform so as you can see we’ve got the chat up here so I just typed in hi that chat box is going to be for you to just say hello say where you’re from you can use it to talk about what we’re talking about you can also use it to talk amongst yourselves now there will be a Q&A box as well once we move into the presentation please only use that for questions because then they’ll be used later on in the webinar so we really need to make sure that that’s only the questions so without further ado I’m gonna go ahead and introduce our speaker mr. Eric Gomez Eric Gomez is a policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute syria’s his research focuses on u.s. military strategy in East Asia missile defense systems and their impact on strategic stability you and nuclear deterrence issues in East Asia he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in international relations from the State University of New York College at Jeunesse ko and the Masters of Arts in international affairs from the bush School of Government and public service at Texas A&M University on so he’s highly qualified he’s the best in the field and I know that you guys are really going to learn a lot from him so I’m going to go ahead and switch it over to his presentation and then you guys can go ahead and start learning and you can see we’ve got the chat box on the right top right we’ve got the questions on the top left so alright Eric I’m going to go ahead and give it away to you all right thanks hi everyone thanks for having me on here tonight really excited to talk to you all about missile defense systems on the Korean Peninsula so yeah we’ll just dive right into it I’m gonna start off by explaining there we go I’m gonna start off by just explaining the broad technical details of how missile defenses work I hope not to you know make your eyes glass over too bad with this description I just want to give a general overview so missile defenses are used to protect areas or specific locations from ballistic missile attack some of these systems are capable of intercepting

cruise missiles or aircraft notably the Patriot system but mostly we’re interested in you know what can these things do against ballistic missiles most of the systems are hit-to-kill which means that they slam into incoming warheads or missile bodies at high speed the best way to intercept these Stander’s of the ballistic missile is to hit the warhead either head-on or from the side or you know if you can’t do that you can hit the missile body itself if the missile does not separate into multiple stages when the warhead is coming back down but that one there’s no real guarantee the destruction of the warhead because sometimes what has happened in the past is that those interceptors hit the missile body but the warhead continues to fall through the debris cloud and ends up striking the earth sometimes though if you get a hit on the missile body the warhead could tumble and disintegrate when it tries to re-enter or it could be thrown off course by the force of the blast when you’re talking about conventionally armed ballistic missiles that’s pretty good because those needs to be relatively accurate to their target but if it comes down to nuclear systems you know the difference in if the missile falls a few hundred meters away from where was supposed to fall it’s still going to do a lot of damage just because of the size of the explosive effects of nuclear weapons missile defenses used to be nuclear-armed back in the Cold War the United States and Soviet Union both fielded nuclear-armed interceptors which sounds pretty crazy to me but now they are mostly if not all hit kill moving on to the sensor systems there’s a variety of sensors that are used to guide the missile interceptor towards its target the first I have the order of it mixed up there the first of our early warning satellites which detect the plume of a missile lifting off usually through infrared sensors then there’s ground-based radars that create a or ground-based radars create a sort of smaller search area so they narrow down where is the warhead are where is the missile and then the infrared seekers on the missile interceptors themselves have the responsibility of homing in on and destroying the target so there’s a lot that goes into successfully intercepting missiles and the longer the missile flies the more sort of sensors you need to have in order to properly cue all the different parts of the missile defense system finally the US missile defense system is layered this means that there are different missile interceptors and system

you like that shots opportunities at different segments of flight if you can see here in the in the presentation and see if I can draw something here okay so you have the nose you can see that all right there is a this segment of flight right here the called the mid-course segment that’s when the missile is up in outer space and if it’s a multi-stage missile this is when stuff is separating from the main little body and the warheads are starting to separate the ground-based midcourse defense system and the aegis system can engage targets in the mid-course segment the other segment of flight where US missile defenses can engage is over here on the right-hand side of that chart called the terminal segment this is when the missile is coming back down to earth and re-entering the atmosphere missile defense missile defenses on this end are the fad batteries and the patriot system that can be used yeah they’re used intercepts in the terminal phase not every interceptor will get a shot for example the fad system cannot shoot at an ICBM but it doesn’t mean that there are there is something to defend in pretty much defend against every single type of ballistic missile in multiple parts of its flight so yeah that’s what it that’s what is meant by layered sometimes you hear layered missile defense and kind of the assumption is that oh every system can get a shot that’s not necessarily true it just means that for a wide variety of threats and had a wide variety of stage of the flight there is something optimized to intercept all right so this is a good illustration of all that I just went over so you have here on the right-hand side you have different types of missiles that are of ballistic missile threats from short on the left – I see some short-range missiles on the left long-range missiles on the right and then you have all the US parts all the parts of the United States missile defense system on the left which would actually intercept them Patriot pack 3 or moving right to left you have the Patriot system right here that is capable of intercepting

short-range ballistic missiles as they come back down to earth in the upper of the atmosphere sad the left of it we’re getting a sad a bit later but that’s good for anything from a short range to an intermediate-range missile but outside the atmosphere it can only engage it’s 20 kilometer altitude burnout 40 kilometer altitude or higher here is the aegis system mostly mounted on warships that can engage anything from a short range to an intermediate-range missile in the mid course space or up in outer space and finally is the GMD system which engages intermediate or intercontinental range missiles the two longest ranges the missiles higher in the earth or higher up in outer space so that’s a brief overview of how missile defenses work so now we’ll focus specifically on a missile defense system in South Korea because I know that y’all are going to be working on legislation or unlock legislation looking at South Korea the big one that the US has deployed is bad the terminal high altitude area defense system this system is relatively new negotiations for its deployment began in early 2016 after a North Korean nuclear test and we’ve all seen the news about how North Korea’s testing multiple kinds of ballistic missiles with pretty high frequency in in recent months in recent years so the fad system consists of several components a radar that is relatively small and mobile six truck mounted interceptors and I believe each truck can fire eight interceptors and battle management components to tie in all the systems together and actually you know that houses the people that actually operate it and choose when to shoot at incoming missiles based off of fads deployments location it is ideally situated to yeah based off of bad deployment location it is ideally situated to defend the southeastern city of Busan in South Korea and I’m going to pull up a map on the next slide and sort of point out where all this stuff is Busan is an essential port facility it is where US or Japanese follow-on forces would land on the Korean Peninsula in the event of a longer conflict so that’s what it’s meant to do sad cannot defend it cannot protect soul from a ballistic missile attack it cannot defend Seoul from rocket artillery attack which has been brought up recently in terms of North Korean

threats to turn Seoul into a sea of fire that would primarily be done with short-range conventional artillery they wouldn’t have to use glowstick missiles to do that although they probably would what else about that the radar associated with it operates in two different modes a early warning mode and a terminal guidance mode the early warning mode has a much longer range but less clarity on the targeting picture and that’s used in early warning mode the radar is used to provide information to other components of ballistic missile defenses to help it get a better shot in terminal mode the Sadd radar has a much shorter range but a clearer targeting picture and it is used to provide targeting data to the interceptors that upon ch’s there are two Tippie two radars stationed in Japan that are both they’re both just the radars by themselves no interceptors associated with them those provide early warning over the Korean Peninsula and the Sadd radar at the site and Southwest South Korea is used to some provide terminal guidance for the interceptors although it is possible to change the mode of this radar in a relatively short period of time I believe it’s on the order of a day or two you can switch it from one mode to the other and this is really concerned the Chinese which I can get into in greater details we have more time my my big current research project is looking at how systems like fad and other missile defense systems impact Chinese nuclear thinking so happy to talk about that at length later okay yes that’s all I had on bed for this slide next slide where is all this stuff okay so I hope this well so you can’t see the map okay so if you have the Korean Peninsula dad is deployed in the southwest corner of it right here oh no where it is right there I can’t remember the name of the city but it’s deployed on a golf course and the sort of white shaded area on that map indicates what its radar band is like so it’s not a 360 degree radar it’s I believe 145 degrees that it can see and those white range rings are out to five hundred one thousand and two

thousand kilometers so the radar has a much greater range than the interceptors the radar can I see a question about the radar on the golf course I think they look the location was chosen I think one to defend South Korea or one to defend certain air bases and port facilities in southeastern South Korea and also to sing mollify some Chinese concerns about what the radar could see into in terms of its ability to see into northeastern China where was I so the radar yeah yeah yeah so as you can see though from the radar coverage here it’s very vulnerable to an attack from the side and when North Korea was testing its submarine-launched ballistic missile last year that was a concern that was raised by other missile defense experts and North Korea experts is that is great for a missile attack coming towards southeastern South Korea from North Korea but if they got a submarine out into the Sea of Japan or the East Sea they could fire an SLBM from the side and ruin bad day in a hurry so that’s one concern about the fabrication in terms of the limitations surrounding it and ok another question here can fat defend against low altitude attacks no it can only defend against ballistic missiles at high altitude specifically ballistic missiles above forty kilometers and altitude because the missile the fat interceptor uses an infrared seeker to home in on its target and the heat of the air around the interceptor is too hot below 40 kilometers that you be higher than that so it’s so the view out the window for the IR seeker is cool enough for it to pick up the heat coming off of warheads and that’s how that time missile defenses homed in on their targets they go out and most of them go out into outer space and see the relatively hot warheads against the backdrop against the background of outer space so that’s how it works and that’s why it would not be able to defend against low altitude attack the Patriot systems might and we’ll get into the Patriots when we get to what the South Koreans have in South Korea okay so this illustrates how the fad radar works on the left is the forward basing mode so it sees a launch early using some information from early warning satellites it tracks the missile as it travels and then provides targeting data to other components of the missile defense

architecture so it can engage it on the terminal base mode which is what the mode will be more what most likely the mode will be in South Korea itself the radar needs to look through the threat cloud or the you know the field of warhead and debris and all that other stuff that is out in outer space when the missile is starting to re-enter it discriminates so it tries to find out okay what piece of that threat cloud is a warhead and then it tells the fat interceptor or and then the battle management software tells the fat interceptor where to fly so that way it can intercept the warhead itself the fad radar is definitely capable of providing early warning data to the GMD in Alaska which defends the u.s. homeland against missile attack the a radar of the same type that is used at bad was recently stationed in onna qualm but Wake Island during a test of the GMB against an ICBM target in May of 2017 and it was more or less the same configuration in terms of distances that what would whoa yeah that you would see in an ICBM attack from North Korea against the United States and the satyr a dar provided targeting data to the GM D so in terms of Chinese fears of fad radar being used to negate its own nuclear missile there’s probably some truth to that at the technical level so we’ll get into that and question and answer part okay so that’s the radar the interceptor of fat itself engages in the terminal stage so this is again as the missile is coming back down towards its target but it engages at very high altitude that’s where the H a in fad comes from a high altitude it can only engage at altitudes of 40 kilometers or higher I’m not sure what the maximum altitude is and fad interceptors only have a lateral range up to 200 kilometers so based off of where the fad is the point in South Korea if you draw a range ring of 200 kilometers around it it does not cover Seoul at that at 200 kilometers the missile will keep traveling but it will not be able to effectively maneuver to actually hit a warhead with with any guarantee of success so that’s that’s what it does on an interceptor Oh in terms of its the range of things that fad can handle everything from a short-range missile to an intermediate-range missile it is intercepted in testing it has the best

testing record of any component of the missile defense architecture its record is 100% it has I think 15 intercept tests and it is successfully intercepted in every test one concern though about the bad seeker is that so when it gets out in outer space and it’s looking at incoming targets it sees essentially points of light in outer space that’s the heat coming off of the warhead and other things that are reentering or about to re-enter and it cannot distinguish distance beyond a certain like 100 kilometers or something so that means in these it needs to look at all those points of light and somehow find out which point of light is the warhead to ram into and one way to mess with that is to cause your missile to break up as it comes back in so that way instead of just seeing just one solid missile with the warhead attached or just the warhead but no missile body fat is looking at through the fat interceptor has to look at one bright light that might be the warhead and then five or six bright lights that might be chunks of the missile flying towards it and in that situation that’s a very hard thing for the for the Interceptor to do as it’s coming towards it so there’s there’s lots of ways to mess with the fad system some other ways could be blowing up a nuclear weapon in outer space to blind the radar temporarily and mess up its its firing control you could shoot at it from the side the submarine launch missile you could try and hit it with an airstrike or some other means to disrupt its radar so it certainly it is a very impressive system on paper but it certainly would not without its limitations I see some folks typing in the Q&A so I’ll just hold on for that until we see yeah it’s really on the second question the fad being developed enough so it’s not easy to be tricked some of this just has to do with just general physics in general missile defense it missile defense is playing a losing game right because missile defense is incredibly expensive to make work and if you’re dealing with nuclear weapons then you need to make sure that you can intercept as many incoming targets as you possibly can it is relatively easy for the other side in this case North Korea to build more missiles than fab could handle and this

was a debate that raged throughout the Cold War where there was concern about you know the United States developing its missile defenses leading to Soviet counter moves that could easily defeat them so I think that there are ways to continue to develop that to make it more accurate to improve it and that might increase its efficiency but until some breakthroughs achieve which allows the United States to build many many many there’s four very cheap getting to a point of sort of perfect missile defense it’s not going to be very realistic and when dealing with nuclear weapons you need to be as close to perfect as possible because the margin of error can be so devastating for the other question why would South Korea need that if North Korea is much more likely to attack at low altitudes bad deployment had a lot to do with politics Alliance politics between the United States and South Korea South Korea the old South Korean president really wanted to have bad the new South Korean president was a little more cautious about it it is a very controversial political decision to deploy it and we can get into domestic politics of missile defenses later and that’s a whole I could be a whole another webinar but yeah so that is limited in what can do we can’t defend Seoul there are some things that the South Koreans have that are capable of engaging the sold at lower altitudes that could defend Seoul I’ll get into that actually on the next slide but for some things like the rocket artillery threat and the conventional artillery threat to Seoul I think the South Koreans have chosen to defend against that with better counterbattery radar so these are like truck-mounted systems that detect incoming projectiles and then figure out where those missiles where those projectiles are coming from based off their flight path and then the South Koreans can launch their own ballistic missiles or rocket artillery to neutralize those positions so that’s how South Korea I think is going to try and defend itself from the North Korean artillery threat finally the disadvantages of bad being in South Korea the primary disadvantage okay so there’s there’s a there’s a few here one disadvantage is that because it can’t defend Seoul some people would say what’s the point of having in the first place another disadvantage which I’ve written about before is called a perverse incentive where you have a missile defense system stationed in South Korea and nominally speaking you would say

that the only defensive right but if the United States decided that North Korea was being too much of a threat and we needed to take out Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons on the ground before he could use them then if you don’t have a missile defense system well well okay you’re never gonna get all of them it’s very very difficult to have a perfect first strike that leaves no nuclear weapon surviving so you’re gonna have to deal with retaliation without sad in South Korea let’s say you get 50% of Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons on the ground so you have to deal with about 30 coming back at you not including you know different types of missiles that could be mounted on whatever so you have to deal with the response if you don’t have missile defense then that response is prohibitively costly right but if you do have missile defense then your first strike doesn’t have to be perfect it only has to be good enough and the US could probably do good enough and enter its own mind where the missile defense where fat could soak up the retaliation and protect US bases in southeastern South Korea and Japan and preserve them enough to continue the fight now I don’t think that that so then so then fat almost becomes an enabler for offensive actions where if you didn’t have it offensive action would be prohibitively dangerous but if you do have it you reduce the danger of the retaliation and so your offensive action looks more attractive again this you know this sort of exchange really plays a role in the Cold War where the Soviets were worried that even a not very good US the Sun system could be good enough to limit damage to a certain point where the US could contemplate striking first now I don’t think that that is how the current administration the Trump administration views missile defense on a day to day basis but if you get into a point where tensions are even higher than they are now and a crisis is really threatening to escalate then there could be that could come into play right it’s like well you know you could see someone coming to trump and saying well mr. president we wouldn’t be able to survive a retaliation or we don’t want to attack because we worry about the retaliation but we have bad in South Korea and the losses would be steep but we can deal with them and if the alternative is go to war or not or if the sorry if the administration has already ruled out a

peaceful solution then missile defenses could make offense more attractive so that that’s that is in my mind the primary disadvantage if you will of that is that at an operational or technical level it’s great but at a sort of strategic and political level it could create these perverse incentives for the u.s. to escalate a crisis in the hopes of in the hopes of winning so all right good questions guys good questions I’m gonna move on to the next slide now looking at South Korea’s defense systems so South Korea primarily has some mix of what are called patriot advanced capability or pack pack three impact two missiles for short-range defense again like sad these are terminal systems that intercept as missiles come back down to the ground but these intercepts happen at much lower altitudes I believe that or Patriot can start intercepting at 20 kilometers or lower and they don’t use infrared seekers they use radar seekers because excuse me because the missiles already coming back into the atmosphere at that point patriot systems are made by the united states primarily and they are widely distributed to our Asian allies including South Korea they’re also in Japan and Taiwan and probably Australia although I’m not sure so that’s that’s one sort of suite of systems at the South Koreans have handy they are also interested in developing their own missile defense systems called the Korean air and missile defense or ka and need excuse me these systems are supposed to be independent of u.s. missile defense they include so the ka MD program is just sort of a blanket term and the components of it include their own land-based radars for early warning and missile guidance ship based interceptors and land-based interceptors actually do the job of slamming at the missile right now it’s a mix of South Korean technology and foreign technology for example the the missiles associated with the with the ka MD our South Korean made but the radars especially the the green pine radar which is used for early warning is actually an Israeli system we get some pin red notes here so the kam D is expected to come online by 2020 its deployment has been rushed up a bit based off of the North Korean threat and it emphasizes only terminal defense some parts of the US missile defense system can intercept in mid-course out in outer

space these are the sm-3 interceptors on Aegis warships and the ground-based midcourse system in Alaska South Korea doesn’t want any of that because South Korea doesn’t need any of that they need to deal with short-range threats primarily which good news for South Korea are relatively easier to neutralize because of this slower reentry speeds of those warheads and both so it easier to do the technology is more proven so that’s the good news for South Korea they might be able to ask the United States for help I am less versed in the nitty-gritty details of various South Korean missile defense systems but I think production mass production of some of the interceptors is just about to start by the end of 2017 and there may be opportunities for United States defense firms or the US missile defense agency to provide some sort of interface with the South Koreans to help them get their systems off the ground and help them you know build up that could be something for you all to pursue in your legislation that you’re working on something authorizing levels or something authorizing specific exchanges between the United States and South Korean military’s to help basically get the South Koreans to improve their missile defense architecture I’m not sure I suspect there is some cooperation already but I’m not sure what that cooperation looks like so something for you guys to consider let’s see oh sad is supposed to patch the vulnerabilities of the KMD because it’s a more capable system that can intercept at higher altitudes and again K&B has various service their missile systems there are early warning radars ship based interceptors and yeah they’re in general the South Koreans are very interested in maybe not becoming more independent of the United States but having their own sort of system that they could use that are built by them and developed by them so that there are a bit less reliant on the United States so kam Dee is one part of that that’s for missile defense and air defense the other two big projects that the South Koreans are working on is something called kill chain kill chain would target North Korean missiles on the ground before they could be launched and I believe for these for a kill chain the investment is primarily in aerica strike aircraft land attack cruise

missiles and conventionally armed ballistic missiles the other part of this oh sorry and kill chain also targets Kim Jong Un’s and other members of the North Korean leadership the other system that the South Koreans are building is called km PR the Korea massive punishment and retaliation system which is designed to retaliate against North Korea if they were ever to attack in an overwhelming fashion essentially Bern North Korea to the ground and burn Pyongyang to the ground as a and I think the hope is that by threatening to do that that raises the risk for Kim jong-un to escalate so it keeps him in this box alright moving on to my last slide which is good timing for entering the Q&A for the politics and strategy of missile defense so sort of taking a step back from all the nitty-gritty technical stuff one thing I sort of alluded to earlier is the offense defense balance and how it does not favor missile defenses because missile defense has costs much more than ballistic missiles and it’s very difficult to have a perfect defense and when you’re dealing with nuclear weapons you need to be as close to perfect as possible I think this was very the the the really good illustration of this that I heard recently was that someone said oh well the United States used the Patriot system to intercept a drone and the drone was about $400 and the Patriot system like the missile itself was you know in the hundreds of thousands or even low millions of dollars and you can see how that would be not that doesn’t leave you in a good place right in terms of what you can buy with that kind of money what sort of defense trade-offs are you making to expand this Wilma senses I mean it sounds like the South Koreans are willing to afford the high cost in missile defense and also spend money on other conventional systems all the power to them um but when you have to make the trade-offs it’s it’s a little bit of a tougher call also the perverse incentives in missile defense we talked about earlier again that missile defenses could provide a sort of shield for a pre pre-emptive attack this was a major concern again going back to the Cold War of yes you know you I think the Soviets would say the Americans you know yeah you say that missile defenses are a shield for you but really you know a better shield means that you can strike us with your sword or your spear and with like more confidence that you won’t be hit yourself so these systems are not so easily conceived about defensive and

that really plays into concerns with the Chinese it also influences North Korean nuclear doctrine so the North Koreans have a very small arsenal and it’s very vulnerable so when you have a small in role or vulnerable our arsenal your best option is to threaten to escalate as soon as you can in order to discourage your adversary from escalating in the first place and this is pretty much exactly what the North Koreans are doing right now they don’t have like an official document on it that I’m aware of but if you look at all their statements about how they would use their nuclear weapons in a crisis they all linked them to if we detect an attack is imminent we will go first of our nuclear weapons and the hope is by threatening to do that that the United States doesn’t take a first move in the in the first place and missile defense plays into this because if the North Korean retaliation is ragged and it can’t get through a missile defense shield well then the North Koreans need to again that speeds up the time line the North Koreans are working with so what you have is a very dangerous crisis situation finally from the US perspective missile defense is a technological solution to a strategic problem or a political problem I think the United States really loves this American is apple pie um to say that all right so you have a problem on the Korean Peninsula of you have North Korea with nuclear weapons we really wish they didn’t have those nuclear weapons and we need to figure out how to prevent them from using them so instead of trying to sort of comes to terms with the fact that North Korea could deter us we are going to plus up missile defense as much as we can to reduce our vulnerability as much as we can and then you don’t have to engage with the bigger strategic problem with a bigger political problem with North Korean nuclear weapons it’s a very American way to I think approach conflict um I don’t think it’s a very good way to the first conflict but that’s just my opinion and yeah okay so that’s that’s it on my presentation I will you know we have about well less than 15 minutes now for Q&A so Oh Maddie I’m sorry but the Q&A may have been moved there it is okay present moon was president moons opinion on fat for South Korea this has been an interesting question to nail down so in

Korean domestic politics sad the decisions deploy it was heavily associated with Park young II who was the former president and she when she was impeached in disgrace the overall opinion of the fad deployment decision went way down I don’t think ever I think the majority of the South Korean people have supported bad but it came close to like a 50/50 split on approved versus disapproved when it was the height of the impeachment scandal and then when moon came into office the military heat I think the Liberals in South Korea have some trouble with the military and getting the military to do what they want what’s called civil military relations they aren’t as smooth as they can be in the United States so when moon discovered that you know the military sort of rushed up the fabs appointment decision in order to get some stuff in place before the election because during the Elector in the campaign he was relatively negative about that I think moon really didn’t like that and so he went ahead with this environmental review and quote environmental review to sort of slow roll the process but now he’s I think more onboard as North Korean missile testing has continued so I think means I don’t think he likes bad but I think he views it as an important part of the u.s. south korean alliance and the US commitment to south korea and then i think he also sees that the more that North Korea actually tests the missiles the greater the need is to have something even if it’s not a perfect defense at least there’s something there to provide a measure of reassurance to his people so I think that’s moons opinion I think that’s where moon is it’s a not a static position and something that’s changing with the times but I don’t think that there is any you know chance of bad being reversed there’s the deployments vision being rolled back in the near future there’s North Korea of any type of anti-missile defense I don’t think so I know a lot about North Korean ballistic missiles but I don’t know much about their other systems a lot of their air defense systems are derivatives of older Soviet technology with some of their newer systems being a bit more capable but I don’t think it’s anywhere near the US is really the best at missile defense and this and the Israelis are also very good at missile defense and you know how eyes of Israel United States you have the technology are more capable as well but I don’t think the North Koreans have any real chance of limiting damage to themselves the in missile defense but their air defense network is very dense in terms of just how many sites they actually

have even if it’s even if they’re older missile defense sites they could still probably do a number on attacking forces giving tackling the political problem the diplomatic services is more effective than those little vents I think in the long run yes so the problem the main problem with Trump’s approach to North Korea is that you have these very broad sanctions that are being levied and the campaign is all about pressure right the problem is that if you have something that’s all about pressure but there’s no obvious path for North Korea to reduce pressure or to you know get it out or take an off-ramp then oh and also if the stakes for North Korea are existential they’re not going to want to take the off-ramp right if the option for North Korea is we either have nukes and we survive or we give them up and we’re and run the risk of being overthrown by the United States then they’re going to cling very tightly to those nuclear weapons no matter how much external pressure you put on them no matter how much missile defense you put in they’re going to cling harder and I don’t think that you get to a different place with North Korea politically unless there’s some sort of negotiation now what that negotiation actually like would look like very hard to tell and I don’t have a good answer for that but I think that you know but I think that’s the ultimate so the long-term solution that doesn’t have war in it is probably probably that route so oh boy lots of questions um let’s see here in the South Korean can work yeah I think the South Korean economy can economy can handle the cost and politically as the North Korean threat grows there’s going to be greater pressure to do something about it militarily this is true that yes that is out of range to protect Seoul if you draw a range ring out from the golf course where it is deployed up to 200 kilometers the effective range of it that interceptor Seoul falls just outside of it some of like the southern and southeastern suburbs are covered but not the main part and not the parts that are closest to the DMZ are there environmental harms that bad I’m not sure there might there may be something with the radar and electromagnetic radiation but I think it’s relatively minimal but I’m not an expert on the environmental impact of it how about China’s response ah yes Chinese I love this so my big research project has been focusing on China’s nuclear forces and how they react to US missile defense

development and the important thing to understand about China is that their nuclear forces are very small they have maybe 200 to 250 warheads across their whole arsenal almost entirely delivered by ballistic missiles and those two hundred or so warheads that need to deter India Russia North Korea the United States and US allies so it’s a very there’s a lot of pressure on the system and there’s all these it’s very interesting about how you know trying to develop this nuclear weapons in order to you know why do they pick that size why do they have such a restrictive doctrine of nuclear use for example the Chinese have what’s called a no first use doctrine which means that they have not to threaten to use nuclear weapons first in a war they would only use them in a retaliation and their operating protocols are pretty indicative of that so like when the Chinese trained they only trained under conditions where they’re wearing MOPP gear which means they assume that they’ve come under attack already they do not make their warheads delivery vehicles so they keep them sort of they keep the warheads either at bases a few kilometers separate from their missiles themselves or they keep them at central storage a specific military base and then have to move them to their missiles in times of conflict but the United States so as the united states increases missile defense system systems for both regional and homeland contingencies the chinese have been very worried about the viability of their nuclear weapons in the face of these improvements because we could probably destroy a lot of china’s forces on the ground in a first strike and then mop up the rest with the retaliation so the chinese are left with two basic options build out their nuclear forces and just increase the number to overwhelm missile defenses or they can introduce a degree of ambiguity into their nuclear doctrine in order to essentially scare the united states out from escalation i think they’re going to do the second thing based off of the whole of their analysis and you know the chinese don’t want to arms race the united states we already have a too much of an advantage it would take away money from conventional missions in their military etc there there’s a host of reasons why they why they won’t just build out the problem with adding ambiguity into your nuclear doctrine is that crises become a really dangerous because we don’t know if we don’t know where China’s red lines are their assumption is that we won’t cross any in the hope of avoiding mass

collation but that as soon that we are not willing to risk escalation at all and I think that’s a false assumption on the Chinese part I think that if there was a conflict over Taiwan or or some other area that started getting out of hand the Chinese would feel a lot of pressure to sort of reach for nuclear options and in general this is a policy issue that is that is not the only reason behind it right I think bad and China’s reaction to it was emblematic of a bigger problem for a bigger strategic issue I’m sorry the second option from China introduced ambiguity about it’s from nuclear red lines in the hopes that the United States does not escalate any crisis for fear of crossing them and this enables them to keep their arsenal relatively small which and keep their doctrine still nominally no first use while hollowing it out so some examples of a hollow no first use pledge is that right now the Chinese assume that we would have to attack them with a nuclear weapon and order for them to use their nuclear weapon or weapons but they might say that a conventional attack against the missile base could count because they couldn’t be sure of what follow-on the tax would do or if they started losing their radars and ability to communicate with one another and that interfered with command and control then they would face a window of opportunity to escalate or risk losing their deterrence completely and it’s this is this general issue of you know how does missile defense impact China and how would US and China interact with one another in a nuclear crisis is something that has gotten some attention in academia and if you know you’d like I’d be happy to provide some articles for that but it’s something that really isn’t discussed very widely in government circles when talking about excuse me when talking about the US response to North Korea that few minutes left try to these rapid-fire given this has given Japan’s decision to rule out the deployment of a THAAD system on Japanese soil was the expected Japanese reaction so Japan is not ruling out fab they are considering sad or something called Jesus ashore which is basically the the module from the age of combat ships mounted on the ground Aegis ashore could provide total coverage of Japanese territory with fewer sites which means less money but the Japanese have also been in talks to purchase bad systems from the United States so they could have both or they could just have one I

think that they’re leaning closer to aegis at the moment then sad just because of the money and the coverage issues but yeah so they’re they’re not ruling out anything can you provide any details on the South Korean experiments I can not provide just on that I’m not sure I’m not sure if these are things that will be up for export or not with Chinese backlash that that outweigh the benefits of keeping in deploying more systems in South Korea I heard about this and I think I think it is an understudied question and it deserves more attention I’m not sure I think a lot of it depends on where is the us-china relationship going in the long term is the us-china relationship going to be characterized by more conflict or more cooperation and I think if can if present trends hold there’s going to be less cooperation more conflict and I especially worry about what happens in the Taiwan Strait when the military balance between the US and China is less clear and something happens that that risks a conflict right and I think the Chinese are assuming that the United States never is not willing to escalate a conflict over Taiwan because we don’t have as much at stake and I think that fundamentally miss reads how the United States would view such a crisis and the big worry among IR scholars on this is if the Chinese start losing that conflict do they reach for the nuclear option as a means to say stop or as a means to reverse their prospects on the battlefield and this doesn’t have to necessarily be a nuclear use it could be a demonstration shot like a detonation out in the desert to signal the United States hey slow down but then you get in all these questions of crisis signaling and a whole other body of literature and it’s I I think it’s it’s underappreciated and it’s very risky so I think the backlash could outweigh the risk but at the bare minimum there needs to be a public discussion about the risk and I don’t think that’s high up on the agenda of you know missile defense advocates right now possibility of your unification between North Korea South Korea and I mean I hope so I hope so but I don’t know how likely it is in the current climate I think we’d have to do a lot of work to sort of deescalate things before we get to that point a couple more minutes leftist is mad at a turn to North Korea well we’re not really in mad so mad means usually assured destruction and the US could

without a doubt destroy North Korea North Korea cannot destroy the United States but the balance of stakes are different so North Korea it’s a matter of life or death in a matter of survival and for us it’s not like if we had to we could live with a nuclear North Korea right like just like we live with a nuclear communist China and a nuclear Pakistan and India and a nuclear Russia you could live with it deterrence could hold and wouldn’t I’d be mad but I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty of deterrence they’re here because I could talk about forever it would bore you but you know III think that so I think the deterrent model is different but deterrence could still hold the question is part of deterrence is acknowledging the fact that you are deterred and I think that is a big psychological barrier for the United States especially with North Korea but I you know I do think the threat of retaliation does deter them and I think our conventional capabilities deter them and yeah so I think the turns can hold I was in North Korea but it’s not mad can trump push the nuclear button without congressional approval yes Trump can do that theoretically any time he wants the US nuclear command and control system is set up so that the president can order a strike as they see fit but most presidents wouldn’t just do that the obvious risk of retaliation and and you know the danger that it could the dangerous precedent that could set yeah yeah some could do it nothing stopping him on that finally given that bad is largely ineffective so North Korean threat when such being arrested I’m worth bad batteries partly security theater so the the deploying more batteries it was more a matter of deploying batteries that were already sort of sent over but not like fielded yet it’s a bit of a minut distinction but and I mean fat is effective at protecting a good swath of South Korea it’s just not the it’s just not as effective against defending the capital yeah so I mean I I think part of it is also just alliance politics right you know China are not China Alliance politics where fat is an important indicator of cooperation between the between the United States and South Korea generally speaking final question where can we find our closer to Chinese red line ambiguity yeah so the probably the best one on this that I’ve seen is an article by Caitlyn Tallmadge

out of George Washington University called would China go nuclear and it examined a hypothetical conflict scenario over the south or not South China Sea sorry the Taiwan Strait and discusses okay if the US had to target certain command and control or soon communication facilities as part of its conventional fight against China what are the risk that those strikes could degrade China’s nuclear retaliatory capability and there’s also there’s a few other articles from the same Journal and it’s called international security that are that get into this issue as well and I’m happy to share those with Maddie so she can pass this on to you but yeah those are the best places and again the type of stuff that I talked about with the Chinese is that is discussed in academia but not really discussed at the public level I went to an event with with someone who was a big missile defense advocate and I asked him the question of like you know how does these missile defenses aimed at countries like North Korea and Iran impact these sort of long-term prospects of us-china or us-russia stability and their response is essentially well you know they know that the system is not meant for them or that you know we don’t have to worry about it just because of the technical limitations of what the system can do and they are right but I don’t think the Chinese care sad is no threat directly to Chinese it cannot intercept and Chinese missiles unless the missiles are flying towards the bad battery so it shouldn’t worry them but it does but they do military exercises simulating attack massive ballistic missile attacks of conventional weapons on bad batteries they write about it constantly in very authoritative sources their strategists worry about it when they talk to us you know us interlocutors in strategic stability and negotiations they do care even if the capability is not that good so I think it’s important for that discussion to make its way into the public space so alright I think that’s it on the time and the questions Matt er are you going to pop back on for the end here can’t can’t hear you sorry all right well thank you Eric we really appreciate it this has been so helpful I think everyone is going to be very able to debate this and talk about it very educated now so all right I’m going to go ahead and switch to our survey page

now everyone here you guys could just take a second to fill out this survey I see someone has already started which is awesome that would be super helpful and then we’re gonna go ahead and as you guys saw on the chat and we’re gonna post the YouTube video sometime this week which is the recording of this and then we’re also gonna have some resources from the surco mez we we will be able to post those in the BIOS so it’s all in one place to be really easy for you and feel free to reach out to me by email if you have any questions or would like to find out more about debate webinars my email is M Carper at Bill of Rights Institute org mcar ter at Phillip rice Institute org so all right I’m gonna I’m Eric and I are going to hop off the cameras we’re going to let you guys do your thing fill out the survey but like I said thank you so much for attending