South Korea’s military appears to have deployed more than 300 short-range ballistic missiles in fixed concrete bunkers near Seoul, an arrangement that suggests it could be used as a first-strike weapon against North Korea, two U.S. security analysts have assessed.

But some ROK experts contend that the missile bases are aimed at rapidly responding to a DPRK attack rather than preemptive strikes, highlighting a debate about how the two Koreas’ development of increasingly precise missile systems exacerbates escalation risks.

According to a study published in Survival, a bimonthly journal by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the three