North Korea is threatening to launch a nuclear first strike on us--after cancelling the armistice that has suspended the Korean War:
"Since the United States is about to ignite a nuclear war, we will be exercising our right to preemptive nuclear attack against the headquarters of the aggressor in order to protect our supreme interest," the North's foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency.
It will be interesting to see how these work out:
North Korea was conducting a series of military drills and getting ready for state-wide war practice of an unusual scale, South Korea's defense ministry said earlier on Thursday.
If the North Koreans have any brain cells to rub together, they'll recognize that the war practice shows that North Korea is completely unprepared for war. Their military is large but composed of near-antique weapons with soldiers ill-fed and not used to practicing with their weapons. Unless North Korea can dissolve the South Korean army with mass chemical strikes and some nukes thrown in so that North Korea only has to road march south without organized resistance, North Korea will die as a state by the end of the war they start.
Until North Korea gets nukes, they have one threat only: bombarding Seoul.
North Korea could do tremendous damage to the South Korean capital that lies very close to the DMZ. This article kind of cracks me up in that it refutes the idea that Seoul could be literally "flattened" by a North Korean bombardment. Good grief, people. Seriously? People really argue whether Seoul can be physically destroyed and wiped out? And if it can't be done except over many months of bombardment, it apparently doesn't count?
Even the above article concludes:
There's no doubt that North Korea's massive deployment of artillery, and potential deployment of roughly 300 ballistic missiles, could wreak havoc on Seoul and its population. What's clear, however, is that a sudden barrage of shells and missiles would only mark the beginning of a battle for the city, not an apocalyptic fait accomplit.
And it is laughable to speak of precision weapons making simple bombardment obsolete in the "real world." That's our real world. In North Korea's real world, they'll bombard Seoul to cause chaos and inflict as much punishment as possible. In the real world, people don't just bombard islands and sink ships out of the blue just to put on another performance of Dead South Korean Theater for the people back home to enjoy.
I have always assumed that the destruction of Seoul would be both from a bombardment and a battle if Seoul becomes the front line. Think Berlin 1945, at worst, which didn't literally erase Berlin. "Destruction" is not meant to be taken literally to mean the elimination of the city and its people. But over a thousand heavy artillery pieces will do a lot of damage and kill a lot of people.
People who insist that counter-battery fire will silence North Korean guns before they can do much damage over-state our ability to find and kill the guns. Even the South Koreans realize they might not be as good as they assume. I never forget that at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the French artillery commander promised that no Viet Minh artillery piece would fire more than a few times before his own guns destroyed it. He didn't even come close to fulfilling that promise.
I know, it is a long way from then and our precision is better, as is our recon. But the North Korean pieces are dug in with plenty of ammunition available. Assuming rapid counter-battery fire will work isn't just a matter of having precision weapons. We have to know where to aim the weapons. In 1999, our Air Force thought it crushed the Serbian army. But when the fighting ended, the Serbian army promptly marched out of Kosovo, showing no indication of being decimated. Our precision weapons did not destroy the Serb army, and during the war we over-stated what we destroyed. I still remember the picture of a success--which turned out to be a World War II-era American tank destroyer.
Even in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, where our air power was very effective in tracking and attacking moving Iraqi units, units that did not move were able to surprise us.
So do we really know where all the firing points are? Do we know which ones are dummies and which ones are real? Do we really assume we can destroy every weapon? Do we really assume the North Koreans can't replace those weapons that we do destroy and keep firing? Do we really think that we can erase this threat before the North Koreans inflict serious damage to the home of a quarter of South Korea's population?
Hey, didn't Israel assume they could quickly wipe out all of Hezbollah's rockets if it came to war? Yeah, they sure did assume that. And they failed to slow down the bombardment of northern Israel one bit during the 2006 war.
I sure don't assume we can cleanly knock out North Korea's guns and rocket launchers. Even if I assume the North Koreans will achieve far less than the total destruction of Seoul, tens of thousands of casualties and tens of billions of dollars in damage will be pretty bad. And what if North Korea throws in chemical weapons? Yes, it would be the biggest Dead South Koreans pageant, ever! Mission accomplished.
Who wants to assume that the nutballs in North Korea won't believe that with North Korea's superior will, they'd emerge victorious in an exchange of fire that relies on numerous North Korean artillery shooting at close Seoul versus the damage Pyongyang would suffer from long-range missiles and aircraft?
No, the only way to stop the bombardment is to occupy an arc of terrain north of the DMZ to control the territory that puts artillery in range of Seoul. Those exercises the North Koreans are conducting will demonstrate just how far the North Korean army has fallen. Reduce the threat to just long-range missiles and aircraft, and Seoul can be defended without too much damage.
And South Koreans are no longer so afraid of Pyongyang's threats that they quake in their boots when North Korea bellows:
"We have all preparations in place for strong and decisive punishment, not only against the source of the aggression and its support forces but also the commanding element," Major General Kim Yong-hyun of the South Korean army told a news conference in one of the clearest threats Seoul has made.
I suspect that the South Koreans will try to limit their own response to counter-battery fire and strikes on Pyongyang. But I also suspect that they over-estimate their ability to shut down North Korea's artillery. If North Korea doesn't voluntarily halt their bombardment, the South Korean army will need to roll north to protect their capital.
And one that happens, all bets are off on whether the fighting can be stopped before South Korean or Chinese troops are sitting in Pyongyang.
