SEOUL, South Korea — Brace yourself for rumbles from North Korea and headlines about “rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula” precision-striking a newsstand near you.

South Korea and the United States initiated springtime joint military drills this week — drills which customarily inflame North Korea and inspire a wave of bellicose rhetorical missiles from Pyongyang.

The first salvo came Monday as the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned that Washington and Seoul will pay a “dear price” for their “adventurist acts.”

“The large-scale war drills staged by the world’s No. 1 nuclear weapons state and more than 10 satellite states against a state in the Korean peninsula where a nuclear war may be ignited even with a spark, can never be called ‘defensive,’” North Korea’s Ministry of National Defense said Tuesday in a statement. The U.S.-South Korea drills are “getting more undisguised in their military threat to a sovereign state” and are “further causing provocation and instability.”

But the vibe on the streets of South Korea’s capital, which is just a short drive from the North Korean border, tells a different story: Seoul is calm, and there are few signs of civic defense measures. Local residents say they have no contingency plans for the crisis, and even expatriates are unconcerned.

But analysts still caution that, contrary to a popular belief, war could break out suddenly. The pre-combat indicators, in fact, could provide a casus belli — the spark for conflict on the long-divided, heavily armed Korean peninsula.

Tense times

This year’s exercises, dubbed “Freedom Shield 2024,” run through March 14. U.S. commanders said the drills will feature live, virtual, and field-based components. The training focuses on “multi-domain operations leveraging land, sea, air, cyber, and space assets with an emphasis on counter nuclear operations and non-kinetic effects,” the U.S. Forces Korea statement said.

While most participants will be American and South Korean, 10 U.N. Command nations that fought for South Korea during the 1950-53 war are joining: Belgium, Canada, Colombia, France, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, New Zealand, the Philippines and Thailand.

While the drills reaffirm “the unwavering commitment of the U.S. to defend [South Korea],” they also “bolster security and stability … across Northeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific,” the U.S. military statement noted.

According to South Korean media reports, the exercises will also “include training on detecting and intercepting the North’s cruise missiles” and will include 48 field drills — double the number from 2023. That uptick may be explained by security concerns and the virtual collapse of any diplomatic contacts with North Korea since President Biden took office in 2021. Some analysts say the concerns are justified.

Australia’s Lowy Institute has warned of a possible “Hamas-style” assault on Seoul like the devastating surprise attack on Israel in October. A widely quoted article by the U.S.-based website 38 North in January described the standoff on the Korean peninsula as “more dangerous than it has been at any time since June 1950” — the year North Korea invaded.

A 2018 North-South “deconfliction” agreement that, among other items, established no-fly zones and barred armed troops at the border,. fell apart last year. The Kim regime has closed down communications channels with Seoul and Washington and added to the tension by bolstering military and economic ties with Russia.

Pyongyang has supplied as many as 3 million 152mm artillery shells and 122mm tactical rockets to fuel the Kremlin’s campaign against Kiev, the South Korean government revealed last week, while Russian President Vladimir Putin has used Russia’s permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council to widen cracks in the international sanctions imposed on North Korea.

With no economic levers to pull, democratic states cannot prevent Pyongyang from expanding its arsenal. A steady schedule of North Korean weapons tests, from missiles of all classes to nuclear-armed underwater drones, also have steadily raised tensions in the region.

But while those moves have tightened the screws on South Korea’s political, military and media classes, for ordinary South Koreans the talk of “rising tensions” in light of recent developments seems misleading.

An indefensible capital

Despite Seoul’s proximity to the border, civil defense measures, which were vigorously drilled under the authoritarian governments that ruled South Korea from 1961 to 1987, have fallen out of practice.

“There was a so-called national emergency planning office and all major companies and agencies had an emergency planning officer,” recalled Moon Chung-in, a professor emeritus at Yonsei University. “They used to do ordinary peoples’ training on the 15th of every month, but that stopped as inter-Korean relations got better.”

With civil defense training proving unpopular in an increasingly prosperous, high-tech, democratic South Korea, governments reacted accordingly.

“Authoritarian regimes conducted civil defense but there was heavy criticism in society,” Mr. Moon added. “They were ruling the country in the name of national security, so needed all kinds of gestures to support the national security machinery.”

While systematic training is absent, Seoul still boasts vast underground space — subway stations and tunnels, shopping concourses, apartment parking lots. But unlike, say, Taipei, another capital facing a constant military threat, Seoul’s shelters are poorly marked as shelters, and there is no push by local residents to take survival training classes. Reports of individuals prepping for a coming war are newsworthy only for their rarity.

Unworried civilians

Even as the military exercises proceed, many South Koreans acknowledge their lack of preparation for the worst.

“I feel a little embarrassed that I don’t have specific plans” for hostilities, said Lim Eun-jung, an academic. “If something happens like a direct attack on Seoul, I think everybody would panic.”

“I know [the] government has some plans,” she added.  “… Anyhow, I hope they do … and I hope they can be more communicative.”

Chang Su-beom, who heads the design agency DN, admitted he wasn’t even aware that this year’s spring military drills had started.

Regarding possible hostilities, he said, “I have never worried about it.” What would he do if the missiles started landing? “I really have no idea,” he admitted.

An officer worker with dual Argentinian/South Korean citizenship, who did not want to be quoted by name, said she was similarly unprepared. When she first moved to Seoul, she kept a packed bag and a cache of U.S. dollars at the ready, with plans to “run to the airport.” 

That was 14 years ago. “These days, I have no plans or preparations,” she said, while noting, “When this kind of news breaks, my parents ask me to return to Argentina.”

Expatriates agree that risks look more ominous abroad than they do in South Korea itself.

James Kim, who heads the U.S. business organization AMCHAM Korea, said that during 20 years in South Korea, he received “a lot” of queries about military crisis response. No longer.

“In the past several years, I have not received a single inquiry about this topic,” he said. “Maybe just one or two calls from people who don’t know Korea, or are not in Korea.”

As for global news reports of tensions, Mr. Kim said, “If these concerns were real, I wouldn’t be here.”

This attitude is mirrored in investor confidence. AMCHAM conducts an annual survey of U.S. companies in South Korea every year, including the latest one completed in February.

“We found South Korea was the second preferred destination to establish an Asian HQ in, after Singapore,” Mr. Kim said. 

Seoul capital markets have also shrugged off the tensions, and retired military professionals working in risk management find little business.

One said he was surprised by the dubious ideas some expatriates have — such as the plan to head for U.S. bases in hopes of evacuation if war breaks out. Those bases would be prime targets for North Korean strikes, he warned.

Another belief is that, if war was imminent, there would be ample signs that would offer residents time to evacuate. That belief may be mistaken — in fact, pre-combat preparations could themselves trigger combat.

“I don’t think there will be signals: For the North Koreans to win this, they would have to have complete surprise,” said Steve Tharp, an ex-U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who is retired in South Korea, and whose South Korean family consider him “nuts” for having assembled a crisis stockpile of bottled water, spam, dried noodles and toilet paper.

“The two signals our side would send would be a U.S. noncombatant evacuation and a total South Korean mobilization,” he said. “Both [capitals] recognize those as unofficial declarations of war, which would bring about hostilities.”

• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.