1. Problem: Expanding the Nuclear-Powered Submarine Debate from "Construction" to "Sustainment"

Even the most advanced fighter aircraft will remain grounded without mechanics, hangars, and spare parts. Nuclear-powered submarines are more demanding still: each is, in effect, a reactor moving beneath the sea. In addition to the maintenance required for any warship, they require reactor safety inspections, radiation control, and nuclear-fuel handling. Without a robust maintenance system, therefore, a nuclear-powered submarine becomes not a military asset but a national burden. This is why the debate in Korea must shift from simply building nuclear-powered submarines to sustaining them over the long term.

Korea's nuclear-powered submarine program is no longer an abstract concept. On May 26, 2026, the Ministry of National Defense announced the Basic Plan for the Development of a Republic of Korea Nuclear-Powered Submarine, formally establishing the following principles: the use of low-enriched uranium (LEU); domestic development and construction; high reliability and safety; total life-cycle management from design through decommissioning; launch of the first boat in the mid-2030s; and entry into operational service in the late 2030s. In particular, the plan states that the entire process—design, construction, operation, maintenance, nuclear-fuel management, and decommissioning—will be managed from a total life-cycle perspective to ensure "operational sustainability." This makes clear that nuclear-powered submarine policy cannot stop at hull construction.¹⁾

The central question Korea must now ask is no longer simply whether it can build a nuclear-powered submarine, but whether it can operate the submarines it builds safely and at a high level of availability for several decades. Availability is the proportion of boats in the fleet that can actually be committed to operations. A nuclear-powered submarine is an exceptionally complex weapon system integrating the hull, weapons, reactor, nuclear fuel, propulsion plant, combat system, radiation safety, crew training, a dedicated maintenance base, a parts supply chain, and emergency-response capabilities. The French Navy notes that a single Suffren-class nuclear-powered attack submarine comprises roughly one million components and requires approximately eight million labor hours to build. Unless the maintenance system is prepared in advance, a vessel of this complexity can spend long periods tied up at a pier or in dock rather than operating at sea even after trillions of won have been invested in its construction.²⁾

Experience in the United States and the United Kingdom shows that even countries with world-leading nuclear-powered submarine design and construction capabilities can suffer a sharp decline in fleet availability if they fail to secure adequate maintenance facilities, skilled personnel, spare parts, and resilient supply chains. France, by contrast, has operated LEU-based naval nuclear propulsion for decades and developed an integrated sustainment system comprising scheduled major overhauls (IPER), in which the entire vessel is inspected and repaired at predetermined intervals; integrated operational sustainment (MCO), which brings maintenance, parts, costs, and availability under unified management; the Fleet Support Service (SSF), which oversees MCO at the national level; the long-term maintenance plan (PMMI); and dedicated maintenance bases and training institutions. The value of the French model lies not in the transfer of any particular reactor design, but in the combination of institutions, organizations, facilities, and personnel that enables nuclear-powered submarines to be operated safely, maintained effectively, and returned to sea for decades.

The nuclear-powered submarine discussed in this paper is not a nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine (SSBN), which carries nuclear warheads for strategic retaliation, but a nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) armed with conventional weapons. The central argument is that the success of Korea's SSN program will depend less on the number of hulls launched than on how early Korea establishes design-stage maintainability, a scheduled overhaul system, availability-centered integrated management, a dedicated maintenance base, skilled personnel, and a reliable supply chain. ROK-France cooperation should likewise be structured to secure these sustainment capabilities at an early stage.

II. Maintenance Determines Operational Availability of Nuclear-Powered Submarine Force

For a submarine force, being listed in the inventory is not the same as being operationally available. Some boats are deployed; others are preparing to deploy or conducting crew training; still others are undergoing short inspections or lengthy overhauls. For nuclear-powered submarines, this cycle also includes reactor safety inspections, radiation control, nuclear-fuel-related work, and the replacement and modernization of specialized equipment. The effective size of the force is therefore determined not by the total number of hulls in the inventory, but by the number and condition of boats that can safely put to sea at any given time. Put starkly, a navy may possess ten submarines yet be able to deploy only about half of them if its maintenance system is inadequate.

The U.S. maintenance bottleneck. According to a table compiled by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) from U.S. Navy data, 16 of the 47 U.S. nuclear-powered attack submarines in FY2024—about 34 percent—were undergoing depot-level maintenance, leaving 31 available for operations and training. CRS identified shortages of personnel and constraints at the four public naval shipyards, together with problems in the repair-parts supply chain, as the principal causes of the increase in unavailable boats.³⁾ The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that attack submarines accumulated 8,906 days of "active idle time pierside while waiting for maintenance to begin" during FY2016-2025, and that approximately $4.2 billion was spent supporting submarines affected by maintenance backlogs or delays.⁴⁾ Even the world's foremost submarine power has had to keep roughly one-third of its attack-submarine force tied up when its maintenance infrastructure could not keep pace. Because this loss of combat power resulted not from deficiencies in the submarines themselves but from inadequate dock capacity, personnel, parts, and scheduling capability, it constitutes a direct warning for Korea.

The United Kingdom's availability crisis. A 2026 report on AUKUS by the House of Commons Defence Committee, citing evidence submitted to Parliament, noted that some submarines had waited more than two years for maintenance because of facility shortages at Clyde and Devonport and the priority accorded to ballistic-missile submarines. It also reported that none of the five Astute-class boats then in commission had completed an operational deployment during the first half of 2024. In other words, the United Kingdom had commissioned five of its most advanced submarines but had not deployed a single one on operations during that period. Few cases illustrate more starkly that the capacity to build submarines and the capacity to keep them operational are distinct capabilities. The report emphasized that the maintenance and support facilities, personnel, and supply chains needed to sustain SSN-AUKUS must be in place from the day the first boat enters service and remain available for decades thereafter.⁵⁾

Three lessons follow from the U.S. and British cases. First, maintenance is not a follow-on support function to be arranged after commissioning; it is a core performance requirement that must be incorporated into design and force planning from the outset. Second, a maintenance bottleneck cannot be resolved merely by building another dock. Skilled personnel, spare parts, technical data, long-lead-time items, safety inspections, industrial work, and budgets must be coordinated as an integrated whole. Third, expanding fleet size does not automatically increase availability. If the number of boats grows faster than maintenance capacity, the result may instead be more vessels waiting for work and more boats tied up for prolonged periods.

Korea's sustainment system must be designed simultaneously at three levels. At the vessel level, the design must provide safe access for maintenance personnel, routes for removing and replacing equipment, radiation shielding, diagnostic capabilities, and functional redundancy. At the fleet level, Korea must establish a rotational schedule linking operations, training, short-cycle maintenance, and major overhauls, together with dock allocations and availability targets. At the national level, the Navy, the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA), nuclear safety authorities, research institutes, shipyards, and equipment manufacturers must be connected through an integrated framework for managing contracts, costs, personnel, parts, nuclear-fuel-related schedules, and technical data. The significance of France's IPER-MCO-SSF system is that it offers a comparative model linking all three levels.

III. The Core of France's Nuclear-Powered Submarine Operations and Maintenance System

Now that Korea has formally adopted an LEU pathway, France is effectively the only Western country to have successfully operated and maintained LEU-fueled nuclear-powered submarines for several decades. Because U.S. and British nuclear-powered submarines use highly enriched uranium, French operational and maintenance experience provides the closest empirical precedent available to Korea.

Low-enriched uranium and a long-term industrial base. A defining feature of France's naval nuclear propulsion system is its use of LEU and its partial reliance on an upstream industrial base shared with the civilian nuclear sector. The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) explains that LEU for naval nuclear propulsion and for Électricité de France (EDF) reactors is obtained through the same procurement channels, while certain metal components are supplied by the same industrial ecosystem. CEA holds program responsibility and design authority for shipboard reactors, while the Directorate General for Armament (DGA) holds program responsibility and design authority for the vessel as a whole. TechnicAtome and Naval Group perform the principal industrial roles in the reactor and shipbuilding domains, respectively.⁶⁾ This structure demonstrates that sustaining nuclear-powered submarines is not merely a matter of one shipyard's capabilities; it requires state agencies, the Navy, nuclear institutions, and industry to preserve technology, expertise, and personnel over several decades.

The scheduled major overhaul (IPER). France's IPER is not an emergency repair undertaken after a failure, but a life-cycle management process in which a submarine is withdrawn from service at predetermined intervals for comprehensive inspection, repair, and modernization of reactor-related systems, the hull, the propulsion plant, combat systems, and safety equipment. In human terms, it resembles a program of scheduled comprehensive examinations and any necessary surgery, rather than a visit to the hospital only after illness strikes. According to the French Navy, Suffren-class boats undergo approximately ten weeks of scheduled maintenance each year and a major scheduled overhaul lasting about eighteen months roughly once every ten years. During this major overhaul, the reactor is defueled, welds and critical equipment are inspected in detail, aging equipment is replaced, and capabilities are upgraded. The work requires dedicated access structures around the reactor, lifting equipment, workshops, and several hundred types of specialized tools.⁷⁾

The recovery of the Rubis-class nuclear-powered attack submarine Perle demonstrates that IPER and MCO can support not only routine periodic maintenance but also the resilience of the force. Perle suffered severe damage to its forward hull in a 2020 fire at Toulon while undergoing IPER. France then integrated the existing overhaul with a recovery operation that attached the forward section of the decommissioned Saphir to Perle's surviving aft section. Following reactor restart, dockside and sea trials, and technical certification, the submarine returned to the operational cycle in 2023.⁸⁾ What Korea should note is not the specialized hull-splicing technique itself, but the manner in which state agencies, the Navy, and industry combined accident recovery, major overhaul, capability upgrades, and safety certification within a single managed process.

Integrated operational sustainment (MCO) and the Fleet Support Service (SSF). MCO translates literally as "maintenance in operational condition," but it extends far beyond maintenance in the narrow sense of repairing failed equipment. It encompasses preventive maintenance and repairs; the provision of spare parts, specialized tools, and technical data; capability upgrades; and the management of contracts, inventories, costs, schedules, quality, and availability. France's Fleet Support Service, operating under the authority of the Chief of Staff of the French Navy and drawing on the DGA's technical expertise, oversees the MCO of both surface ships and submarines within a single national program-management organization. SSF plans, prepares, and directs maintenance; manages spare-parts inventories and technical expertise; and prepares in advance the support arrangements required when future vessels enter service.⁹⁾

The core principle of the French division of responsibilities is that, although industry performs the actual maintenance, the state and the Navy retain ultimate responsibility for availability, schedules, costs, and quality. For Suffren-class MCO, Naval Group—the prime contractor with experience in design and construction—performs the maintenance, while TechnicAtome participates in reactor-related work. The French Navy, however, retains direct oversight of contract execution and performance. In addition, a maintenance manager assigned to each vessel prepares the long-term maintenance plan (PMMI) and coordinates dock use, industrial work, and logistical requirements.¹⁰⁾ This arrangement suggests that Korea should not reduce nuclear-powered submarine maintenance to ex post repair contracts entrusted to a particular shipyard. Instead, it must establish a program-management structure in which the state remains accountable for availability and total life-cycle cost.

Maintenance bases and personnel must be ready before the first boat. France launched the "Barracuda Reception and Support" (ASB) program in 2019 to upgrade the Missiessy sector of the Toulon naval base in preparation for the Suffren class. The program is being implemented in phases to provide three docks for routine maintenance, emergency maintenance, and the ten-year major overhaul, together with a reactor workshop, a fuel-element storage pool, and related safety facilities. Facilities for the large-scale scheduled overhaul are being prepared for around 2030, when Suffren's first major overhaul is expected.¹¹⁾ This experience shows that a nuclear-powered submarine maintenance base is not simply an enlarged conventional naval dock. It is a distinct piece of national infrastructure integrating reactor work, contamination control, radiation monitoring, emergency power, firefighting, fuel handling, and radioactive-waste management.

Personnel development must proceed in parallel with facility construction. France's School of Military Applications of Atomic Energy (EAMEA) offers approximately fifty courses in naval nuclear propulsion, nuclear safety, radiation protection, and risk management. It trains an average of roughly 1,000 military and civilian students each year, in programs ranging from a few days to two years.¹²⁾ The present paper does not focus on the training system itself. The key point is that the certification and periodic requalification of maintenance personnel, the cultivation of a strong safety culture, and the accumulation and dissemination of lessons from incidents are all integral to sustainment. Even if the submarines and docks are ready, availability cannot be maintained without sufficient reactor operators; mechanical, electrical, and electronics maintenance specialists; radiation-protection personnel; safety supervisors and emergency responders.

Taken together, the French experience yields three principles. First, maintainability is not an attribute to be added after commissioning; it is a core performance requirement that must be secured at the design stage. Second, a major overhaul is not merely a suspension of operations, but a process that restores service life and combat capability by combining safety inspections, nuclear-fuel-related work, repairs, and modernization. Third, only an integrated management system linking the Navy, state agencies, industry, training institutions, and maintenance bases can sustain an advanced submarine as a genuine operational asset over the long term. The fact that France's Barracuda contract covered not only the construction of six submarines but also a specified period of MCO likewise demonstrates that acquisition and sustainment were not treated as separate programs.¹³⁾

IV. ROK-France Cooperation: Opportunities, Constraints, and Priorities

ROK-France cooperation need not involve the wholesale adoption of French nuclear-powered submarine or K15-series reactor designs; realistically, it should not be premised on the transfer of such sensitive technologies. France's greatest comparative advantage lies in its decades of experience integrating maintainability reviews, scheduled major overhauls, basing and safety, training and qualification, and the division of responsibilities between the state and industry into a coherent system for sustaining LEU-based naval nuclear propulsion. Cooperation should therefore focus not on transferring classified design data, but on jointly reviewing and validating the sustainment system required to ensure that a Korean SSN can be maintained and returned to operations after commissioning. Because this approach enables France to cooperate without assuming the burden of transferring sensitive technology, it offers a realistic model likely to be acceptable to both countries.

ROK-France cooperation is not intended to replace ROK-U.S. cooperation. The Korean government has formally stated that it will consult closely with the United States on securing and managing LEU and will work with the IAEA to establish a safeguards framework applicable to nuclear-powered submarines.¹⁴⁾ Nuclear fuel supply, nonproliferation, IAEA safeguards, alliance-level information security, and combined operations should be pursued primarily through close ROK-U.S. consultations. France, by contrast, can serve as an "operations and maintenance validation partner," helping Korea reduce trial and error and schedule risk in the areas of maintainability, safety, basing, personnel, and life-cycle management for LEU-fueled submarines. Put simply, if the United States is the partner that opens the institutional door to nuclear fuel and nonproliferation arrangements, France can share the operational know-how needed to sustain submarines once Korea has passed through that door. Defining the U.S. and French roles as complementary rather than competitive will enhance both the international acceptability and the practical feasibility of ROK-France cooperation.¹⁵⁾

At the same time, the potential scope of cooperation should not be overstated. French naval nuclear propulsion technology is subject to national-security, nonproliferation, and industrial-confidentiality restrictions, and the CEA, DGA, French Navy, Naval Group, and TechnicAtome differ both in their respective roles and in the scope of information they are authorized to disclose. Within Korea, unless the responsibilities of the Navy, DAPA, nuclear safety authorities, research institutes, and shipbuilders are clearly defined, cooperation with France may amount to little more than one-off training visits or general consultations. Before requesting cooperation, Korea should therefore break down its technical and institutional requirements into specific tasks and determine which agencies will be responsible for negotiations, contracting, safety oversight, and performance management. On that basis, four priorities for ROK-France cooperation can be identified.

First, joint design-stage maintainability reviews and development of the scheduled overhaul system. During the basic and detailed design phases of the Korean SSN, France's operational experience could support a joint review process covering maintenance access, equipment-removal routes, radiation shielding, contamination control, diagnostic capabilities, functional redundancy, specialized tools, and the feasibility of conducting maintenance in dock. Korea would retain final design authority and control of sensitive technologies, while relevant French institutions and companies would assess, within the limits of what may be disclosed or transferred, whether the design is genuinely maintainable. In parallel, the two countries should jointly study short-, intermediate-, and long-cycle maintenance intervals suited to the core life of the Korean reactor and the submarine's mission profile; the inspections, repairs, and capability upgrades to be performed during major overhauls; and methods for preparing a PMMI.

Second, establishment of an availability-centered integrated operations and maintenance management system. Rather than copying the organizational structure of France's SSF, Korea should analyze its functions and design a national management structure suited to Korean institutions. The Navy should be accountable for operational requirements and the availability of each submarine; DAPA should manage the program, contracts, and costs; and nuclear safety and radiation-protection authorities should exercise independent safety oversight. Shipyards, nuclear-specialist institutions, and equipment manufacturers should be responsible for design, maintenance, and parts supply, while the state integrates maintenance schedules, nuclear-fuel-related schedules, spare parts, personnel qualifications, technical data, and total life-cycle costs. A joint ROK-France research team could be established to design the mission, authority, and staffing of a provisional "Integrated Nuclear-Powered Submarine Sustainment Management Office."

Third, cooperation on maintenance bases, nuclear safety, and emergency response. Drawing on the Toulon ASB program, Korea should examine from the basic design stage the requirements for berthing facilities, routine-maintenance docks, major-overhaul docks, reactor work areas, radiation monitoring, contamination control, fuel handling and storage, radioactive-waste management, emergency power, and firefighting and cooling systems. Realistically, cooperation should focus less on the simple provision of facility drawings than on establishing safety requirements, validating workflows, drafting emergency scenarios, conducting simulation exercises, and developing independent verification methods. Korea needs a concurrent-development approach in which the detailed design of the submarine and the design of the base are validated against each other, rather than a system in which facilities are retrofitted after the first boat has been launched.

Fourth, long-term management of maintenance personnel, technical data, and the parts supply chain. Drawing on EAMEA's shareable experience in training and qualification management, Korea could pursue phased training programs for officers, noncommissioned officers, defense civilian personnel, and private-sector engineers, together with instructor development and joint exercises in nuclear safety culture and emergency response. At the same time, parts catalogues, service-life and failure data, inventory standards, long-lead-time items and components at risk of obsolescence, specialized tools, maintenance procedures, and configuration-management data should be integrated from the design stage. Cooperation with France should emphasize not short-term technical instruction, but the development of instructors, qualification assessors, and maintenance managers who will enable Korea to preserve its own maintenance knowledge and qualification system independently over the long term.

To institutionalize this cooperation, the two countries should establish an "ROK-France Nuclear-Powered Submarine Operations and Maintenance Cooperation Council" comprising representatives of the two governments, navies, safety authorities, research institutes, and industries. Under the council, four working groups should be created: maintainability and scheduled overhaul; integrated management and contracting; basing and safety; and training and supply chains. Cooperation should begin with joint research and personnel exchanges in non-sensitive areas and expand as tangible results and mutual trust accumulate. France's experience with arrangements such as the SNA 25 MCO contract, which integrates the management of costs, schedules, and quality over an extended period, could provide a useful reference for designing performance-based maintenance contracts and state oversight in Korea.¹⁶⁾

V. Building Korea's Sustainment Capability and a Roadmap for Phased ROK-France Cooperation

The success of Korea's nuclear-powered submarine program should be measured not by how many boats are launched, but by how many can be kept safely operational. Because the Ministry of National Defense's basic plan adopts total life-cycle management and operational sustainability as guiding principles, the government should develop a separate "Jangbogo-N Sustainment and Maintenance Roadmap" in parallel with the submarine development schedule. This roadmap should place maintainability requirements, availability targets, maintenance cycles, basing, personnel, supply chains, total life-cycle costs, and ROK-France cooperation tasks on a single timeline.

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In the first phase, design review should receive the highest priority. Performance requirements must cover not only speed, acoustic signature, and armament, but also whether maintenance personnel can safely access equipment and remove or replace major components, whether reactor-related work can be performed safely, and whether diagnostic capabilities and functional redundancy are sufficient. This phase should also establish the respective authorities and responsibilities of the Navy, DAPA, nuclear safety authorities, and shipyards, as well as the site and scale of the maintenance base and baselines for personnel requirements, parts requirements, and total life-cycle costs.

In the second phase, submarine construction should proceed in parallel with development of the maintenance base and training system. Long-lead-time items and components at high risk of obsolescence should be identified early, and configuration management should begin for maintenance procedures, drawings, software, and test data. Cooperation with France could focus on lessons learned from the ASB program, the safety design of work areas, IPER preparation procedures, and the development of instructors and maintenance managers. By the time the first boat enters service, facilities, personnel, and procedures capable of handling at least routine maintenance, emergency maintenance, and reactor safety incidents must be fully operational.

In the third phase, boats 1 and 2 should serve both as operational assets and as platforms for validating the sustainment system. Test and evaluation should generate failure data, parts requirements, maintenance times, data on radiological work, and emergency-response results, all of which should be fed back into design, maintenance procedures, inventory management, and training curricula. Measures of success should extend beyond launch and commissioning schedules to include scheduled-maintenance compliance rates, mean time to repair, critical-parts availability, qualification attainment rates for crews and maintenance personnel, and safety indicators.

In the fourth phase, Korea should stabilize a multi-boat rotational operating system on the basis of actual operational data. The four- and six-boat figures presented here are policy scenarios rather than definitive determinations of the appropriate force size. Four boats may serve as a reference point for a minimum rotation structure separating operations, training, short-cycle maintenance, and major overhaul, while approximately six boats may provide a medium- to long-term benchmark for maintaining reserve capacity against maintenance delays or unexpected failures. The final force size should, however, be determined incrementally in light of the core life of the Korean reactor, actual maintenance cycles, missions and operating areas, the crewing system, dock capacity, and budget constraints. Rather than fixing a number in advance, Korea should decide whether to expand the fleet on the basis of availability and maintenance data accumulated from boats 1 and 2 and from the initial multi-boat force.

Implementation of the roadmap should be reported periodically to the National Assembly and relevant agencies to the extent permitted by security considerations. Key indicators should include availability by submarine, compliance with scheduled maintenance, delays in starting and completing maintenance, critical-parts availability, personnel qualification attainment, radiation-safety indicators, and projected total life-cycle costs. Only with such indicators can the nuclear-powered submarine program be managed as a national undertaking lasting more than forty years, insulated from short-term political calendars and the symbolism surrounding the launch of the first boat.

The real strength of a nuclear-powered submarine force is determined not by the number of hulls built, but by the national capacity to complete maintenance and return those submarines to sea on schedule. France's IPER-MCO-SSF-ASB system shows what Korea must prepare from the design stage if it is to avoid repeating the maintenance bottlenecks experienced by the United States and the United Kingdom. Korea should establish the institutional foundations for nuclear fuel, nonproliferation, and alliance operations through cooperation with the United States, while developing substantive cooperation with France in maintainability, scheduled overhaul, integrated management, basing, safety, personnel, and supply chains. Building nuclear-powered submarines is only the beginning. The ultimate goal of ROK-France cooperation should be to develop maintainable nuclear-powered submarines and a force that can be sustained for decades. Only by incorporating maintenance into the design from the outset can Korea ensure that its nuclear-powered submarines will still be going to sea three decades from now.

1. Ministry of National Defense, Basic Plan for the Development of a Republic of Korea Nuclear-Powered Submarine, May 26, 2026; Korea Policy Briefing, "First Nuclear-Powered Submarine to Be Launched in the Mid-2030s: Ministry of National Defense Announces Basic Plan," May 26, 2026.
2. Marine nationale, "Sous-marins nucléaires d'attaque : le maintien en condition opérationnelle 'lourd'," 18 juin 2025, https://www.colsbleus.defense.gouv.fr/fr/sous-marins-nucleaire-dattaque-le-maintien-en-condition-operationnelle-lourd (accessed July 18, 2026).
3. Congressional Research Service, Navy Virginia-Class Submarine Program and AUKUS Submarine (Pillar 1) Project: Background and Issues for Congress, RL32418, 2026, Table 1 and Appendix C. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL32418 (accessed July 18, 2026).
4. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Military Readiness: DOD Should Take Further Actions to Address Challenges Across the Air, Sea, Ground, and Space Domains, GAO-26-108888, 2026, "Attack Submarine Maintenance Delays," https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-26-108888/index.html (accessed July 18, 2026).
5. UK House of Commons Defence Committee, AUKUS, Eighth Report of Session 2024-26, HC 841, 28 April 2026, paras. 94-103, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmdfence/841/report.html (accessed July 18, 2026).
6. Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), "La propulsion nucléaire : un atout pour la France," 7 juillet 2025, https://www.cea.fr/presse/Pages/actualites-communiques/defense/propulsion-nucleaire-atout-France.aspx (accessed July 19, 2026).
7. Marine nationale, "Sous-marins nucléaires d'attaque : le maintien en condition opérationnelle 'lourd'," op. cit.
8. Ministère des Armées, "Le sous-marin nucléaire d'attaque (SNA) Perle de retour dans le cycle opérationnel," 6 juillet 2023, https://www.defense.gouv.fr/marine/actualites/marin-nucleaire-dattaque-sna-perle-retour-cycle-operationnel (accessed July 19, 2026).
9. Ministère des Armées, "Notre organisation : Service de soutien de la flotte (SSF)," https://www.defense.gouv.fr/marine/mieux-nous-connaitre/notre-organisation; Marine nationale, "Ingénieur général de l'armement Guillaume de Garidel-Thoron, directeur central du service de soutien de la flotte," 16 juin 2025, https://www.colsbleus.defense.gouv.fr/fr/ingenieur-general-de-larmement-iga-guillaume-de-garidel-thoron-directeur-central-du-service-de (accessed July 19, 2026).
10. Marine nationale, "Sous-marins nucléaires d'attaque : le maintien en condition opérationnelle 'lourd'," op. cit.
11. Marine nationale, "Programme 'Accueil et soutien Barracuda', une collaboration étroite entre la Marine et le SID," 19 juin 2025, https://www.colsbleus.defense.gouv.fr/fr/programme-accueil-et-soutien-barracuda-une-collaboration-etroite-entre-la-marine-et-le-sid (accessed July 19, 2026); Ministère des Armées, "Service d'infrastructure de la Défense : Programme Accueil et soutien Barracuda," https://www.defense.gouv.fr/marine/cols-bleus/cols-bleus-magazine/passion-marine/soutiens/service-dinfrastructure-defense (accessed July 19, 2026).
12. Ministère des Armées, "L'École des applications militaires de l'énergie atomique (EAMEA)," https://www.defense.gouv.fr/marine/mieux-nous-connaitre/ecoles-formations/lecole-applications-militaires-lenergie-atomique-eamea (accessed March 1, 2026); CHEONG Seong-Chang, "Directions for ROK-France Cooperation on Nuclear-Powered Submarine Personnel Development: Lessons from France's EAMEA and a Roadmap for a Korean Naval Nuclear Training Center," Sejong Focus, July 21, 2026.
13. Sénat, Projet de loi de finances pour 2009 : Défense - Équipement des forces, "Le programme de sous-marins Barracuda," 2008, https://www.senat.fr/rap/a08-102-5/a08-102-517.html (accessed July 19, 2026).
14. Ministry of National Defense, Basic Plan for the Development of a Republic of Korea Nuclear-Powered Submarine, op. cit.; Korea Policy Briefing, "First Nuclear-Powered Submarine to Be Launched in the Mid-2030s: Ministry of National Defense Announces Basic Plan," op. cit.
15. CHEONG Seong-Chang, "ROK-France Cooperation to Reduce the Time and Risk of Building a Korean Nuclear-Powered Submarine: A ROK-France Technical Validation Roadmap Compatible with a ROK-U.S. LEU Fuel Agreement," Sejong Focus, June 18, 2026.
16. Marine nationale, "Sous-marins nucléaires d'attaque : le maintien en condition opérationnelle 'lourd'," op. cit. According to this source, the SNA 25 MCO contract is worth just under €1 billion over four years, with Naval Group serving as prime contractor for the maintenance work under the supervision of the French Navy.

※ The opinions expressed in 'Sejong Focus' are those of the author and do not represent the official views of Sejong Institute.