North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Vipin Narang: Why Seoul doesn’t need its own nukes to counter North Korea

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

This week, Dr. Vipin Narang joins the NK News podcast to unpack how the U.S. and South Korea are seeking to strengthen extended deterrence against North Korean threats under the joint Nuclear Consultative Group, a platform that he helped develop and lead as a key nuclear policy official under the Biden administration. Narang highlights how […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast, available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the private podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NKNews website at NKNews.org slash private-feed. Hello, listeners, and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jacko Sweetsuit, and this episode is recorded on Monday, the 21st of September, 2025, here in the NK News studio in Seoul, and I'm joined here for the first time by Dr. Vipa Narang, who is an American political scientist. He served as the acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy until

August 2024, which is a portfolio that includes space and missile defense policy as well as nuclear deterrence and countering weapons of mass destruction policy. Since then, he has returned to MIT, where he is the Frank Stanton Professor of Nuclear Security and the inaugural director of the Center for Nuclear Security Policy. By the way, he was also co-chair of the Nuclear Consultative Group, the NCG, established as a result of the Washington Declaration in April 2023 to strengthen the U.S. ROK alliance and enhance extended deterrence on the Korean Peninsula, something I'm going to ask him a lot about today. Welcome on the show, Dr. Nareng. Thank you, Jack. It's great to be here finally after so long and delighted to have this conversation.

So the NCG, the Nuclear Consultative Group, I believe that it met a total of four times between December 2023 and July 2024, culminating in the signing of the guidelines for nuclear deterrence and nuclear operations on the Korean Peninsula in July 2024. Is that? that are basically right? That's right. There are four meetings, but through January 2025, the beginning of January 2025 was the fourth meeting after I had returned to MIT. We had three meetings between July 2023 and then July 24. So it's on a every six month, a tempo. Although, you know, when there are transitions in administrations, you know, the plenary meeting may get delayed. I believe there is an upcoming one in the coming weeks or months, which will be the

fifth NCG meeting. Hopefully that sticks. But the guidelines document was the big deliverable after the first year. And I felt very comfortable returning to MIT after that because it sets up the NCG as an institutional body to govern the extended deterrence relationship between the U.S. and Rock. And you've already kind of given away my future question in that it still exists under the Trump administration. So it's not something that was born and ended with the Biden administration. It continues. Yeah. And I mean, that's always a question because, so I would say that the reason the NCG or something, we'd call it something else, right? But the reason why the vehicle is necessary and the reason I am hopeful it will continue under any administration in the U.S. and in South Korea, keep in mind, you know, the Washington Declaration was signed by President Yun and President Biden. The NCG was a product of those two administrations, neither of whom are in office. And so there were questions about whether the Lee administration, and want to continue with it.

And there are certainly questions about the Trump administration's broader approach to extended deterrence and allies. But for the moment, I think the reason it should and will persist is because it is in the national security interests of both the United States and South Korea. It's good for the U.S. It's good for South Korea. And I think the bureaucracies and the organizations and agencies that steward the NCG hopefully have made the case for its continuation because without it,

then they would be the lone extended deterrence relationship without a governing body. Okay, so I think you've hinted at my next question. What problem did the creation of the NCG solve at the time? This is a great question. So prior to the NCG, a lot of acronyms coming our way. So I will try to spell them out if I know what the acronyms actually stand for because in some cases, you know, DOD speak, we just speak an acronym. So prior to the NCG, the U.S. Rock extended deterrence relationship,

ship was embedded within... And extended deterrence for a list of who may not be aware. It basically means South Korea, you don't need nuclear weapons because the United States has them and will extend its umbrella over the... Right. And so there are... South Korea is one of approximately... No one hold me to this because there are corner cases, but approximately 34 formal allies to whom we extend deterrence. 31 of whom are in NATO.

And that includes France, which sits out of the NATO nuclear bodies, but the other 30 then, including Finland and Sweden, who recently exceeded. But the three in the Indo-Pacific region, or Asia-Pacific region to whom we formally extended deterrence are South Korea, Japan, and Australia. There are corner cases. I'm well aware so listeners don't at me about the corner cases. However, those are the three that we typically consider the formal extended deterrence relationships in the Indo-Pacific.

With Japan, for almost 13 years now, I'm getting old, but we've had an extent. deterrence dialogue with Japan, which is public. It is run by the State Department and the Department of Defense and MoFA and the Ministry of Defense in Japan. And it was born out of the U.S. nuclear modernization program in the early 2010-11 time frame. We had retired the Tomahawk, the nuclear-tip Tomahawk, which created some anxieties in Japan. And there were discussions about the future of arms control, and it was a very sort of effective vehicle with Japan. With South Korea, we had embedded within the broader Korea-integrated deterrence dialogue, the kid. What's happening this week?

I believe it's happening this week. So the deterrence and strategy committee was the extended deterrence body within the kid that governed the relationship from about 20, I get the year wrong. It's either 2010 or 2013, but there's a longstanding, you know, extended deterrence dialogue between the U.S. and South Korea, but it was embedded within a broader dialogue, and it was one out of maybe four sessions. This was prior to North Korea's sprint in 20, after 2017. And so, born out of North Korea's continued expansion and diversification of its nuclear arsenal

in the late 2010s, right? So 17, 18, 19, 20. the failure of the diplomatic overtures to Kim Jong-gun during the first Trump administration, there was very reasonable anxiety in Seoul about the growing acuteness of the North Korean threat. And whether the deterrence, extended deterrence, a vehicle that we had with the DSC was fit for purpose, actually 2013, because I use this line a lot, you know, a 2013 extended deterrence vehicle was no longer fit for purpose in a 2023 world. And it was born of that idea and modeled on one of the advantages of my position at the Department of Defense, which we sort of stumbled into happen accidentally, was we centralized a lot of the extended deterrence work with NATO and the Asia Pacific into my office. And me personally at that level, although my huge shout out to my boss, ASD, John Plum, who let me do that.

but also DASD Richard Johnson, who was instrumental in the EDD for the Department of Defense, along with Alex Bell at the State Department, but also the DSC and thinking about how we elevate and augment the extended deterrence relationship with South Korea. And so it was born of a realization that the DSC, for the most part, was a series of repeated talking points every six months, the same talking points about how North Korea was bad, it was growing, but what were we going to do about it? So the NCG was modeled on some of the other work that we, have done for decades at NATO in what's known as the high-level group. And I don't want to

equate what we're doing in the Asia-Pacific to NATO, but in terms of how we run our extended deterrence relationships, the high-level group, the HLG at NATO, has a season, an annual work stream that then reports to the nuclear planning group. And the defense ministers and the Secretary of Defense approve the work streams and the deliverables every year, or at least that's sort of the battle rhythm we had established at NATO. And it occurred to, you know, my battle buddies at the White House and at the Department of Defense that something akin to that, where we are actually working between the meetings and the plenaries towards common objectives. And when we launched the NCG, I mean, this is public. We said this. We had almost a dozen work streams. But we had a lot,

we had a lot of things we had to work on, being able to communicate securely with our rocket counterparts, thinking about what tabletop exercises and scenario-based discussions we need to do, how we think about capabilities, how we think about planning, so that we can get to the ultimate goal of sort of truly integrating our extended deterrence relationship. And often for the history of our extension of nuclear deterrence to our allies, the allies were often passive recipients with a lot of exceptions, but, you know, the U.S. was the senior partner that essentially drove these relationships. And, you know, with the Trump administration and the Biden administration, our allies are doing more. And that's not a bad thing, right? And so how do we encourage the recipients

of extended deterrence? And South Korea, South Korea is a great example, to do more conventionally, invest in the right things conventionally so that, you know, they can support U.S. nuclear operations, but also create sort of a deterrent that is, you know, conventional. to start with, but if necessary, God forbid North Korea employing nuclear weapons, there could both be conventional as well as potentially nuclear responses, but we would know what South Korea could contribute in each of those cases then, while the U.S. contributes the nuclear forces. So I think I get that the core aims that were baked into the nuclear consultative

group is an assurance, transparency, conventional nuclear integration, streamlining, all these different work streams. Could you tell us what concrete habits it institutionalized that didn't exist, say, two years prior? So I'll say there are two big things. One, it forced both sides to really take secure communication seriously. And no signal groups. No signal groups. And that may sound mundane and not sexy, but it is the basis for all of the work that we have to be able to do together on these issues. We have to be able to transmit and at secure levels, secret or top secret even would be sufficient, which we can do with NATO, but we had limited capability with South Korea. Why? There was never a need before, right? Who is? There's not a technological

problem. It just there wasn't a perceived need before. I mean, there's a, there's a, you do need the technology. The technology is not sophisticated. It's just they're limited terminals, for example, where it's possible. And the other thing is sort of, you know, particularly in South Korea, there was not necessarily a familiarity with the security protocols that the U.S. Department of Defense in particular takes very seriously. So huge credit to MND. They really took security and sanitization of classified material very, very, very seriously. And so that has been the enabler to work on these other work streams, and that takes a little bit of time. And I would say that the second thing is that we are actually making progress. These work streams are, we're not just repeating the

same talking points every six months. And that often happened in a lot of these extended deterrence relationships in the post-Cold War world, because there was no obvious threat, right? What work did you have to do when it seemed like nuclear weapons might actually, you know, go away, and certainly Russia and the U.S. were on a process towards with new start, maybe even further bilateral reductions. China hadn't embarked on its sprint. North Korea hadn't embarked on a sprint. We forget that the Asia-Pacific, interiating nuclear security environment, particularly in East Asia, northeast Asia, is a function of really only the last seven years, which is a blink of an eye.

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