A U.S. Navy nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) will visit South Korea for the first time since the 1980s to show Washington’s commitment to protecting the country from North Korea.
On Wednesday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and U.S. President Joe Biden announced the visit.
U.S. SSBNs seldom visit foreign ports because they need secrecy and stealth to survive and deploy nuclear missiles during the conflict.
“That could be a huge pressure on North Korea, because usually they don’t share where those submarines are,” said former South Korean submarine commander and squadron leader Moon Keun-Sik.
To prevent North Korea, which has developed increasingly powerful missiles that can attack targets from South Korea to the mainland U.S., the U.S. has committed to sending more “strategic assets,” including aircraft carriers, submarines, and long-range bombers, to South Korea.
The submarine visit also reassures South Korea.
“If a U.S. SSBN visits and docks in South Korea, that is very unusual and symbolic… the U.S. wants to show it is going for stronger deterrence in a visible way and to calm South Koreans’ concerns,” Choi Il, another retired South Korean submarine captain, told Reuters.
Pyongyang claims that U.S. aircraft carriers and joint South Korea-U.S. military drills show the allies’ hostility.
The Navy has 14 “boomers”—SSBNs. Each Ohio-class submarine has 20 Trident II D5 missiles that can deliver up to eight nuclear warheads to targets 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) distant.
According to a Federation of American Scientists research, SSBNs visited South Korea often in the 1970s, when South Korea debated U.S. commitments and the necessity for nuclear weapons.
“For a few years the boomers arrived at a steady rate, almost every month, sometimes 2-3 visits per month,” stated Hans Kristensen, the report’s author. “Then, in 1981, the visits stopped and the boomers haven’t been back since.”
“Further enhance the regular visibility of strategic assets to the Korean Peninsula” was the declaration’s description of the South Korea tour.
A senior U.S. official, speaking anonymously, told reporters that strategic assets would visit the peninsula more often. Still, there is “no vision for any regular stationing or basing of those assets and certainly not nuclear weapons” in South Korea.
