Nuclear bees in North Korea

Army, Aug 2003 by Collins, John M

* DPRK Option C: Initiate Chemical Warfare. DPRK commanders might turn Option B inside out to maximize U.S.-ROK vulnerabilities and minimize their own. Rather than launch a potentially suicidal invasion of South Korea, which would expose armored columns to devastating U.S. air strikes, North Korean artillerymen could, without warning, unleash massive, sustained chemical warfare attacks against heavily populated Seoul and forward defenses south of the DMZ. Combined Forces Command counteroffensives, launched to limit mass civilian casualties, would compel participants to abandon protective positions before reinforcements arrived and conduct frontal assaults against carefully concealed, deeply entrenched enemy troops.

* DPRK Option D: Initiate Nuclear Warfare. North Korea is believed to possess only a few low yield nuclear weapons that may be too heavy for available missiles to lift, but it would not take many to create a catastrophe. (The U.S. inventory contained only two in August 1945.) DPRK troops could initiate theater nuclear warfare and might hit lucrative targets as far away as Japan, Guam and Okinawa if available devices are light enough to load atop Taepo Dong 1 missiles.

Careful target selection could make the best use of limited stocks in any case. Snoopers, for example, have found at least four large North Korean tunnels beneath the DMZ and suspect as many as 20. A gigantic crater caused by a nuclear device would instantaneously breach U.S.-ROK forward defenses and release a lethal radioactive cloud that would envelope all forces down-wind if just one nuclear weapon erupted anywhere beneath the westernmost third of the DMZ. Kim Jong Il's troops then could pour south over high-speed routes on both flanks while confusion reigned following the first-ever use of nuclear weapons against armed ground opposition. Some pundits cite Seoul as a lucrative target, but it is hard to see why Kim Jong Il would want to level that city rather than preserve its skilled man-power and economic treasures for his own benefit. U.S. reinforcement schedules, however, would be shattered if a shipboard- or truck-delivered bomb demolished Pusan harbor.

Thomas Hobson, who kept a 16th-century livery stable in Cambridge, England, told customers to take the horse nearest the door or none at all, which, of course, was no choice at all. U.S. policy makers and planners who contemplate preemptive operations to neutralize North Korean nuclear capabilities confront Hobson's choices that are little better.

A former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff prefaced his assessment of this survey with these words: "This world has a number of problems which are not amenable to immediate, or even short term, solutions. Among them, I count North Korea. If North Korea starts a war, North Korea loses-big. If anybody else starts a war on the Korean peninsula, the ROK, and just about everyone else involved also loses- or, at least, has little to gain."

Any of the U.S. options described above could trigger uncontrollable escalation that would create appalling casualties on both sides of the DMZ and promise a Pyrrhic victory at best. Unilateral actions by the United States without unqualified ROK agreement and willing participation every step of the way would be immoral as well as ill-advised. Inaction while Kim Jong Il develops a robust nuclear arsenal and perhaps supplies nuclear weapons to U.S. enemies, unfortunately, would worsen any future confrontation.