Also, I think the tunnels have probably been found with ground penetrating radar.

I don’t think China could normally take Taiwan, but what if the US is tied up in the middle east, and Korea goes hot…but Taiwan and China are getting closer and closer all the time economically, so I’m not too worried about that really.

I’m more worried about Israel going nuclear if they get backed in a corner by idiots in Syria/Lebanon during our upcoming Iraqi adventures. Worst case would be if that triggers (was triggered by?) a pan-Arab war against Israel, causing Pakistan and India throw down, and going nuclear there.

But I’ve been paranoid about Pakistan and India nuking each other since before they HAD nukes back in the 80s.

From what I have been learning, the US and ROK troops should be able to stop the NK army from getting very far.

If that is true, the real problem is the Nork ability to cause massive casualties in Seoul especially but also in other cities in South Korea and Japan (via missiles).

Because the artillery (and possible rocket launchers?) is in tunnels, and only comes out to fire, I don’t think any sort of nukes other than ground burst would be effective, and ground bursts produce massive fallout.

With regard to fallout, see this reference on this site. It discusses a lot of issues about nuclear weapons. One point: *any* air burst nuke that goes off high enough will produce no local fallout or persistent radiation. Only if the explosion is in the ground or too close to it do you get local fallout. Thus there was no fallout at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I don’t think the Chinese are going for Taiwan. They have too much to lose commercially (by world embargo) at this time. Also, they currently are not believed to have the capability of taking Taiwan. They do certainly have a long term strategic goal of absorbing Taiwan.

I’m most afraid of us using nukes (neutron bombs) on the DMZ if the North launches an attack. They can lob 500,000 conventional artillery shells a DAY into Seoul, so they don’t even need nukes to effectively destroy the South Korean economy (almost half of their population is in the Seoul metro area).

The only way to stop a charge of over a million men in the short distance between the DMZ and Seoul is with the small yield neutron bombs we developed for use against Russian tanks if they happened to charge through the Fulda Gap in the Cold War.

And we didn’t give all of them up, we kept enough for Korea or Europe if things heated up.

But they ARE might clean low fallout little nukes, designed to not have measureable fallout mere miles away.

But then the Chinese might get frisky and try for Taiwan…

So if things drop in the pot in Korea, I’m not sure what I’m afraid of more, us going nuclear right off of the bat and sparing the South (and their economy), or panty waisting around and getting involved in another land war in Asia.

Yes, keeps one up at night.

1) The US war on Iraq, leaving our forces and attention divided.

2) The US discovery of the covert NK nuclear program, making it less likely that they will be allowed to develop a nuclear deterrence.

Furthermore, with the resources of the south, it would be much easier to develop nukes and the delivery systems.

Finally, they may believe they have a nuclear deterrent. We don’t know where their weapons are… they could be sitting at the bottom of New York Harbor, waiting to be activated!

I agree that the logical thing for the Norks to do is develop a nuclear deterrent, and then take the South. However, history is full of miscalculations in such areas. Also, we don’t know either the rationality of the top level decision makers nor the quality of the information they have access to.

The desire for unification on terms favorable to the North is always an underlying motivation for everything the NK regime does. The question at any given point is whether the North is trying to achieve unification on favorable terms in the short term or as some future goal. If the North was planning an attack then I don’t see what the point would be for all the saber rattling. Perhaps the purpose is to build up in their population a greater sense of conflict with the West to psyche them up for their attack.

The biggest motivation for the North’s development of ICBMs and nukes is to make the North immune from US attack. In order to unite with the South on favorable terms the North first has to manage to not be conquered. The North already has a powerful deterrent in its ability to kill millions of South Koreans. But it wants an even more powerful means to deter the US.

North Korea is trying to use the current conditions to quickly become a nuclear power and to get the US to accept North Korea as a nuclear power. However, the North would have a decent chance of managing to become a nuclear power even if the US wasn’t building up for an attack on Iraq. After all, an attack to stop North Korea would have huge costs in human lives for the South and even would cost the US a lot of lives.

I don’t see the North preparing for imminent attack on the South. Why attack now if they are about to be able to build nuclear weapons? Doesn’t it make sense to wait? If the North first developed a large number of nuclear weapons then I’d expect the chances of attack would become much greater.

I don’t think that we can afford to wait for them to collapse on their own. Totalitarian societies tend to last an extremely long time – much longer than mere authoritarian ones. And while we are waiting, they would most likely be selling nuclear material and nuclear weapons on the world market. Another post addresses that issue, and includes a link to an extremely scary article by Stanley Kurtz.

Thanks for your comments!

John

John Moore thinks North Korea may be about to attack the south. I think they are a long way from that right now, but John makes some interesting points.