South Korea's defense chief called Wednesday for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea if there is a clear indication the country is preparing a nuclear attack.
Meanwhile, a state-run think tank predicted a military coup, popular uprising, a massacre or mass defections after North Korean leader Kim Jong Il dies. Kim, who turns 68 next month, is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008.
They are not unrelated speculations, of course. A collapsing regime might think that war or just threats of war is just the ticket to rallying an angry population and focusing that anger abroad instead of itching to string any communist party member up by their heels from their darkened lamp posts.
The problem, from North Korea's perspective, is that the military balance has shifted so much in favor of the South Koreans that Seoul could contemplate a preemptive attack into North Korea (and not just aerial attacks):
If a crisis erupts on the Korean peninsula and the North Koreans fire even a warning barrage at Seoul, I expect the South Korean army to march north of the DMZ and carve out a no-launch zone in an arc around Seoul to protect their capital and home to a quarter of the population from North Korean artillery. And if the attack is focused just on a no-launch zone, will Pyongyang unleash nukes that might be shot down and which would trigger an American nuclear retaliation?
The South Koreans might not even need the pretext of a northern warning barrage.
