On March 5, 2025, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published the executive summary of NPEC’s most recent war game after-action report: “Assured distraction: How attacks on South Korea’s nuclear reactors could be a smoke screen for wider conflict.”
The war game sought to test if a major radiological release that would prompt the evacuation of millions of civilians could distract key US allies from assisting and rebuffing an all-out military invasion of Taiwan. The short answer was yes.
The game originally presumed that China, wanting to keep the United States, South Korea, and Japan out of a fight over Taiwan, would ask North Korea to strike the Kori nuclear power plant in South Korea to force massive evacuations. But a brief by Joshua Stanton, an expert on North Korea, changed that scenario significantly.
As Stanton explained, North Korea would prefer to mobilize South Koreans who favor confederating with the North to act on Pyongyang’s behalf rather than invade the South. This insight prompted an adjustment to the wargame: Instead of North Korea firing its missiles from over the border, the aerial attacks against Kori in the game would come from locally lofted drones, thereby significantly complicating attribution and response.
Shortly after making this change to the game, political events in South Korea seemed to confirm Stanton’s judgment. South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol’s impeachment proceedings are still ongoing. Yet, what animates the controversy is not just Yeol’s declaration of martial law, but the national debate over how to secure peace on the Peninsula. South Koreans are split between those who believe North Korea is an arch enemy that must give way eventually to a government more favorable to the South and those who believe that a confederation with North Korea is the only way to produce lasting peace.
Another challenge in designing the game was to convince the players—which included former senior Japanese, South Korean, and US security and nuclear regulatory officials, US legislative staff, and US military service members—that attacking nuclear reactors was realistic. Putin’s assaults on Ukraine’s nuclear plants have all but shattered this assumption. Then, on December 31, leaked Russian military plans to attack Japanese civilian infrastructure exacerbated these fears. The plans included targeting the Tokai nuclear complex. Should they choose to also target Rokkasho, home to one of the largest spent nuclear fuel storage facilities in the world, it could result in spent fuel fires and the release of massive amounts of radioactivity—several times greater than at Chernobyl.
Finally, the game’s players assumed the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense. In light of recent events, that may be mistaken. Following Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s disastrous meeting with President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office, some analysts now believe the United States will abandon its global defense of liberal self-government. Instead, Washington would recognize regional spheres of influence for Russia, China, and the United States. If this is correct, the United States would not militarily intervene in East Asia at all. Although this is still only a possibility, it only fortifies the game’s three key findings:
1. Attacks against civilian nuclear plants could strategically sideline Japan and South Korea and impede the United States from effectively dealing with concurrent strategic crises in East Asia.
2. Continued silence of US and allied officials in peacetime about the vulnerabilities of civilian nuclear plants to overt and gray warfare increases the odds and security impacts of such attacks.
3. With gray warfare strikes against civilian infrastructure, including nuclear plants, attribution and deterrence of such attacks can no longer be assumed.
This produced several significant recommendations, including that the United States, South Korea, and Japan need to increase their emergency and military planning and coordination in advance of such contingencies. You can read the full article here.
As always, curious to get your thoughts.
To read the full article, click here.
To read the full occasional paper, Strategic Distraction: Pyongyang’s Proxies Target South Korea’s Reactors, click here.