Good path, to ask the South Koreans what they want - esp. where nukes might (at some point) be involved.

In the Cold War Era, the South Koreans and Germans were both faced with difficult questions - basically, would the village be destroyed in order to save it ? Edward Luttwak outlined the paradoxes in his Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (1987).

The complex issues (when the Thermonuclear Era was younger than I) are covered by Andre Beaufre in his An introduction to strategy: With particular reference to problems of defense, politics, economics, and diplomacy in the nuclear age (1965), and Deterrence and Strategy (1965).

Herman Kahn presented one view in his On Thermonuclear War (1960). Hugh Everett (Wiki) had a less optimistic view in his 1959 "The Distribution and Effects of Fallout in Large Nuclear-Weapon Campaigns" (see notes 11 & 12 of Wiki).

The bottom line is that nukes change the equation drastically, where different folks will apply different strokes to avoid the "The Day After" (1983).

Regards

Mike