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    Korea
     Dec 15, 2010


When North Korea’s threats become reality
By Kim Myong Chol

"The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy."
- General Omar Bradley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1951.

"In carrying out the instructions of my government, I gained the unenviable distinction of being the first United States commander in history to sign an armistice without victory."
- General Mark Clark, 1954

"Never get involved in a land war in Asia."
- General Douglas MacArthur, 1961

"Should the US and South Korea disregard our repeated warnings

 

to unleash war, we must lose no time in going to the heart of the enemy to show them what it is like to fight nuclear war on their own land."
North Korean heir-apparent Kim Jong-eun

"North Korea is developing a frightening track record of making good on its threats."
- New York Times Editorial, June 17, 2009.

A resumption of hostilities on the tiny Korean Peninsula would mean immediate war between two nuclear powers, North Korea and the United States. The latter keeps a nuclear-armed garrison of some 20,000 troops with a sprawling network of military bases across South Korea.

A second Korean War would not fail to disappoint Western experts who wish to see Kim Jong-eun given an opportunity to prove his unprecedented military genius. He would preside over the evaporation of the world's sole superpower in the first thermonuclear exchange ever fought on the spaceship Earth.

Acting for supreme leader Kim Jong-il, the young general is one click away from issuing a long-awaited order to the Korean People's Army's (KPA) shiny and sleek, quick-response global strike force. This would see the torching of the bulwark of the US empire, the skyscrapers of New York City and other centers of metropolitan America.

Crack front-line units of the KPA are ready round the clock to bomb Seoul, turning it into a towering inferno before moving in on the ground to complete their mission.

Japan's cooperation with the US would invite retaliatory nuclear missile attacks on their nuclear power plants, with the result that Tokyo and other major cities of the Japanese archipelago are rendered unhabitable.

Dark clouds gathering
The Korean Peninsula today is teetering on the edge of war, with the trigger-happy Lee Myung-bak government in Seoul vowing to launch airstrikes on North Korea against what it terms a provocation.

A US-supported South Korean military exercise carries every risk of instantly escalating by design, accident, and miscalculation into a full-scale shooting war, and a nuclear war.

The Washington Post reported December 13,
North Korea warned Monday that US-South Korean military cooperation could drive the peninsula toward nuclear war, as South Korean troops began their latest live-fire drills.

Though North Korea regularly issues such threats, few in Seoul now consider the war scenario as empty rhetoric, given the November 23 artillery shelling of a South Korean island that killed two marines and two civilians.
The New York Times on November 23 identified the cause of that day's shelling of the South Korean artillery position on the border Island of Yeonpyeong:
The attack on Yeonpyeong Island occurred after South Korean forces on exercises fired test shots into waters near the North Korean coast. We hope South Korea's president is asking who came up with that idea.
The Independent's Adrian Hamilton observed November 25, "The very worst response to the Korean crisis is to do what President [Barack] Obama did yesterday: that is to announce a joint US-South Korean military exercise on the border this weekend. It was South Korea's military exercises this month that helped bring about the latest clash."

The Joong Ang Daily reported on December 2 that there were an alarmingly sharp increase in the number of live-fire exercises by South Korean troops on that island in the buildup to the November 23 exchange of fire:
The Yeonpyeong Island troops carried out an average 17 firing exercises a year before the arrival of Lee Myung-bak in the Blue House [presidential house]," but the number nearly doubled to 27 in 2008 since his inauguration.

Each of the pre-LMB period firing exercises involved a total of less than 50 rounds, including several K-9 howitzer rounds, but the number of rounds fired after LMB's installation began to exceed it, several scores of rounds on an average.

The September 28 seaward firing drill involved a total 2,631 rounds, such as 35 K-9 howitzer rounds, 8 81mm rounds, 36 60mm, 14 anti-tank rounds, 38 shore artillery rounds and 2,500 Vulcan rounds and 131 anti-aircraft Vulcan rounds.
South Korea was firing over 900 artillery shells per hour into waters on the fringe of North Korea during 10 am to 2 pm on November 23. The absence of a reaction then emboldened them to lob several dozens of shells into North Korean territorial waters.
The Seoul Sinmun reported November 26: "The Joint Chiefs confessed in an off-record gathering that 'it is likely that shells fired by our guns flew beyond the operation control line into North Korean waters'."

The live-firing was part of South Korea's largest war exercise "Hoguk" (a rehash of the Team Spirit war games) involving 500 warplanes, 90 helicopters and 50 warships in a simulated invasion of North Korea.

The landing in North Korean waters of the South Korean artillery rounds was the last straw, prompting an otherwise patient North Korea to react by shelling the artillery position.

The Associated Press (AP) quoted South Korean Defense Minister Kim Kwang-jin on December 3 vowing airstrikes on North Korea.

As the Wall Street Journal reported December 8, "Admiral [Mike] Mullen [the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff] said he had not asked South Korea to take air strikes off the table."

AP reported on December 13:
After the attack, South Korea staged joint military drills with the United States and also pushed ahead with more artillery exercises, despite the North's warning that they would aggravate tension.
The Daily Mail reported December 12, "North Korea warned yesterday that it was ready for an all-out war." The North Korea National Peace Committee added yesterday, "The army and our people are ready for both an escalated war and an all-out war."

Agence France-Presse reported on December 11, "The former chief of US intelligence [retired Admiral Dennis Blair] warned Sunday that South Korea has lost its patience with provocations by North Korea and 'will be taking military action'."

Key differences
A host of essential differences are to be found between the bitterly fought 1950-53 Korean War and the present showdown. The first is the emergence of North Korea as a nuclear power with ballistic missile capability.

Emerging as the fourth most powerful nuclear weapons state after the US, Russia and China, North Korea has several hundred nuclear warheads in its arsenal, including plutonium and uranium-based hydrogen bombs, neutron bombs, nuclear mines and shells.

North Korea has about 8,000 ultra-modern centrifuges operating at underground sites, churning out highly enriched uranium (HEU) like hot cake.

Even one look at them seems to have petrified Dr Siegfried Hecker, the American nuclear scientist whose jaws dropped at a sight of a mere 2,000 above ground during his visit to a plant in November.

The Korean War-era North Korea, a two-year old state, had no capability at all to fire upon invading enemy warships or shoot down enemy bombers, not to mention the capability to fight war on enemy territory such as Japan, Australia, Hawaii and the US mainland.

Despite lacking a modern war machine, the peerless national hero of the anti-Japanese guerrilla war, young Kim Il-sung, led the just-born North Korea to survive the fierce three-year-long, life-and-death struggle with the American giant and its international allied interventionist force, dealing the US its first debacle in history.

North Korea today is a far cry from what it was in 1950s. Fortress North Korea can withstand thermonuclear strikes and shoot down 80-90% of enemy warplanes, missiles and cruise missiles.

Fortress North Korea can easily sink nuclear-powered American aircraft carriers and reach metropolitan US with long-range missiles. It is a pity that the US still clings to the wishful delusion that their white elephants can simply wade into Korean waters.

Its electronic warfare units are capable of playing havoc with the enemy infrastructure of command, control and communications. In the most important development, as a member of the elite space and nuclear clubs, North Korea has the ability to inflict merciless retaliatory strikes on the remotest strategic target on the American mainland, nearly half the earth away.

It will only take Kim Jong-eun a couple of minutes to turn Seoul into a sea of fire, five minutes to torch Tokyo, and 15-20 minutes to evaporate New York and Washington in a "day-after" scenario.

Then there is the presence of nuclear power stations in the US, Japan and South Korea. (See Nuclear war is Kim Jong-il's game plan, Asia Times Online, June 12, 2009.) The US has 103 operating nuclear power stations with onsite storage of a huge quantity of spent fuel rods. Japan has 53 operating atomic power stations and a stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium - enough to assemble more than 1,000 atomic bombs in a short period of time. South Korea has 20 operating nuclear power stations with onsite storage of a huge quantity of spent fuel rods.

If bombed, one average operating nuclear power station is estimated to spew out as much deadly fallout as 150-180 H-bombs. Bombing one nuclear power station would render the Japanese archipelago and South Korea uninhabitable. Doing the same to the US may require bombing one plant on its west coast and another on its east coast.

Nothing is easier than bombing a power plant on a coastline. There is no need to use a ballistic missile. Primitive means will do the job.

Third is the fact that the US, Japan and South Korea are home to booming economies, huge sitting ducks to be caught off guard in an all-consuming nuclear conflagration.

The Americans and the Japanese could afford to complacently look upon the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav and Bosnian Wars, the Iraq War, and the Afghanistan War as if they were waged on another planet, no matter how many innocent people were killed.

These theaters took place in countries that were far removed from industrialized, nuclear powers. They had no means to take the war all the way to the US. That is no longer the case, however. The Americans, the Japanese and the South Koreans would find themselves in a devastating trap.

Fourth is the fact that all of North Korea's population are well trained and well disciplined in a war-time austerity, while the US, Japan and South Korea are not.

While the US's skyscrapers are collapsing in a raging conflagration and people stampeding helter-skelter in all directions for shelter, the whole North Korean population can be evacuated into hardened underground shelters in a matter of 15 minutes.

The moment of truth will come sooner than originally expected, vindicating the validity of the military-first policy mapped out by Kim Jong-il and demonstrating how wise the Korean people are in selecting Young General Kim Jong-eun as heir to the supreme leader.

Kim Myong Chol is author of a number of books and papers in Korean, Japanese and English on North Korea, including Kim Jong-il's Strategy for Reunification. He has a PhD from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's Academy of Social Sciences and is often called an "unofficial" spokesman of Kim Jong-il and North Korea.

(Copyright 2010 Kim Myong Chol.)


North Korean motives on the line
(Dec 13, '10)

Pyongyang stretches deterrence limits
(Dec 7, '10)

Dear Leader's designs on Uncle Sam (Dec 3, '10)


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