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Nuclear weapons are like the sea to fish. They dominate the power structure wars are fought in, post-WW2 at least. There's a reason Libya and Iraq got hammered by the US but North Korea didn't. There's a reason no two nuclear powers have fought anything more than a few skirmishes, limiting the intensity of their wars. There's a reason the US and the other nuclear powers are so keen on nuclear non-proliferation. If nuclear weapons weren't decisive, they wouldn't care so much about them. If nuclear weapons weren't decisive, Russia wouldn't have dared to infringe upon NATO's interests in this war, since they have vast conventional superiority.
I suspect that the Yom Kippur war is the strongest example you have of nuclear weapons not helping defend a country. Yet when Israel threatened to use nukes, the US quickly moved to fly in huge quantities of military aid. They didn't care about the wrath of the Arabs causing hundreds of billions of damage to the US economy via oil prices. The superpowers put huge pressure on their clients to end the conflict in a stalemate before nukes could be used, they didn't let the conflict fester as in so many other wars. Nukes don't need to be used to be decisive in controlling the situation. If they were used, they would be even more powerful.
If Russia attacks, going for a fait accompli, why should the US end the war even if the Russians sweep through the Baltics in 48 hours? It makes the US look totally pathetic if they don't come in and retake that ground eventually. While I maintain that nuclear weapons are dominant, they favor defense over attack. Russia's nuclear threats to defend its army occupying the Baltic aren't as credible as NATO nuclear threats against Russian nuclear first use. Furthermore, Russia has only attacked non-NATO members in conflict with Russian minorities. Even if the Baltics get into a spat with their Russian minorities, they're still in NATO. It would be an incredibly risky and provocative move to attack the Baltics. It'd be a far more aggressive move than invading Ukraine.
I'm afraid I still don't understand why Korea would care at all about such a niche scenario. They plan for some kind of highly-urgent crisis where the Koreans suddenly need more ammunition, so they fly it in from Poland? Why not just plan ahead and buy your own ammunition from your own companies before hand, store it in your own country and keep the airlift capacity for moving things you don't make like US forces or Patriot batteries? There certainly has been a syndrome where NATO countries don't bother to produce ammunition, Russia has been firing off entire years of US artillery production in weeks. But surely the simplest cure is just to produce munitions and spare parts for the weapons one designs, builds and operates!
What if the crisis strikes quickly and there's no time to airlift supplies from Poland, through hostile airspace, to South Korea? What if Poland needs its supplies because it also faces a crisis? What if South Korean defence industry needs some more cash? I agree that the Koreans want to open up markets but this is too far.
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