More on North Korean Impending Attack
Fri March 7th, 2003 18:04 MSTCharles Krauthammer agrees with my assertion that North Korea may take advantage of the Battle of Iraq to attack the South.
He is calling for temporary appeasement until we free up our forces, which may not be a bad idea if it works.
However, I have two areas of doubt regarding his reasoning:
- Is it necessary? Is it really true that we cannot deal with the situation until our forces are freed up?
- Is the North stupid enough to fall for this short-term appeasement trick?
Notice that while the focus has been on Iraq, the US has moved a significant force of heavy bombers to Guam, only three hours flight time from North Korea. There are also embarked Marines and the Nimitz battle group that recently left San Diego. These forces may very well stage near Korea rather than proceeding to the Persian Gulf. Finally, South Korea has substantial well equipped and well trained forces of their own.
If the North truly understands the military balance, they may choose blackmail rather than direct invasion. They have weapons in place that could kill most of the 20 million civilians just south of the DMZ. They might launch a demonstration use of them, followed by non-negotiable demands with a very short deadline. They might also target Japan with a demonstration strike, to encourage Japan to forbid our forces from using Japanese bases.
On the other hand, they may make different calculations and simply invade the South, with their huge infantry and artillery forces, their missiles, their obsolete air force, their obsolete armour, and their large numbers of commandos.
Whatever happens, the Kim Jong Il regime must be destroyed, and after such an attack it would be.
But if we wait much longer, that regime will be able to deter the United States, or at least inflict massive damage, through ICBM launched nuclear weapons!
It doesn’t make sense that the North Korean regime would be influenced by attempts to appease it. They understand very clearly that the US has no intention of attacking North Korea while the US is busy with Iraq. They are very worried about what the US may do afterward though.
What the US most needs in terms of military capability is the ability to very rapidly knock out artillery that is dug into caves on the sides of mountains. I wonder if the new generation fuel air explosives that are under development (using, btw, Soviet developed FAE technology) would be able to kill all the artillery crews and thereby stop the North Korean artillery barrages that would be part of the opening rounds of a North Korean attack on the South.
The other problem is chemical warhead missiles that could kill millions of South Koreans. Those missiles might be very well concealed.
The Norks could be influenced by appeasement if it seems to be in their long term advantage. If they felt they could ease internal problems (if they care at all about those), and still secretly develop their WMD’s, they might go along with it. After all, they certainly were happy to deal with Clinton, and they changed their nuclear program as a result - covertly switching from reactor-produced plutonium to the more difficult uranium enrichment process.
I strongly doubt that we have the capability to take out the artillery tubes and rockets near Seoul with any technology other than ground-burst nuclear weapons, which would be inappropriate for fallout if no other reason.
The Norks have had 50 years to dig tunnels and caves and fortifications, and certainly have adequate engineers. I am sure that they have lots of blast-proof artillery positions - possibly all of them.
FAE’s are more effective than conventional explosives for two reasons: (1) they have more total energy because they don’t have to carry the oxygen they use; and (2) they can produce a planar shock wave which for some distance does not fall off with the 1/r^2 law. Ultimately this means that they are a heat and shock weapon, just like a conventional explosive.
Thus FAE’s are really a way to either make a great big (20T+ equivalent) explosion on a point target, or to do damage over a somewhat wider area than normal bombs. From the standpoint of taking out Nork artillery, they simply reduce the number of weapons one would need to employ, but otherwise have no significant qualitative difference.
Question. How many rounds can they rain down on Seoul per hour in their initial counter attack?
I think a hundred thousand or so. This is probably the main reason they need to be threatened so drastically. Otherwise they would kill millions in South Korea and many in Japan (depending on the missile warheads used there).