06/30/2005
War Games: North Korea
Scott Stossel of The Atlantic Monthly has a piece in the July / August 2005 issue on a recent war game that looked into how to deal with North Korea. The participants included Colonel Sam Gardiner, who runs war games at the Army War College; former chief-weapons inspector David Kay; Robert Gallucci, a former chief negotiator with the North Koreans during the Clinton administration; Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney; Jessica Mathews, former National Security Council member; and Kenneth Adelman, current member of the Defense Policy Board and former assistant secretary of defense. Following are a few of the conclusions, as well as problems we face in a real-life conflict should Pyongyang not back down with regards to current negotiations on the nuclear weapons front.
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“(Aside from North Korea’s reported nuclear missiles), and whereas Iraq did not, after all, have weapons of mass destruction, North Korea is believed to have large stockpiles of chemical weapons and biological weapons. An actual war on the Korean peninsula would almost certainly be the bloodiest America has fought since Vietnam – possibly since World War II. In recent years Pentagon experts have estimated that the first ninety days of such a conflict might produce 300,000 to 500,000 South Korean and American military casualties, along with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. The damage to South Korea alone would rock the global economy.” [Scott Stossel]
“(Trying to take out) the regime’s nuclear sites with surgical strikes – an iffy proposition at best, since we don’t know where some of the sites are – might provoke a horrific war. And trying to create regional nuclear deterrence by allowing South Korea, Japan, and even Taiwan to become nuclear powers would undermine the global nonproliferation system that has been in place for more than forty years. The North Korean regime may be fundamentally undeterrable anyway: President Kim Jong Il has reportedly said he would ‘destroy the world’ or ‘take the world with me’ before accepting defeat on the battlefield. And as bad as Kim is, what comes after him could be worse. A complete collapse of the regime might lead not only to enormous refugee problems for China and South Korea but also, in effect, to a weapons-of-mass-destruction yard sale for smugglers.
“There are still other dangers. If we did successfully invade, our troops would be likely to eventually find themselves near North Korea’s Chinese border. The last time that happened, in 1950, the Chinese counterinvaded. [A 1961 treaty obliges China to do so again in the event of an attack on North Korea.]” [Scott Stossel]
Following are the comments of the participants in the war game at various stages.
David Kay, on how little we know. “We believe a lot. We actually know very little.”
Robert Gallucci: “This is a country that has exported ballistic missiles when no other country on earth is exporting ballistic missiles – a country that has threatened explicitly to export nuclear material .If there’s an incident, the worst we can imagine, the detonation of a weapon in an American city, will we have attribution? Will we be able to track it back to North Korea?”
Thomas McInerney: North Korea could use Seoul, just thirty-five miles from the DMZ, as a “hostage” – to threaten to turn it into a “sea of fire.” But McInerney says that “If threatened with the transfer of nuclear weapons from North Korea to terrorists, we have to do something.”
Colonel Gardiner said that one thing that could keep the U.S. from gaining rapid control was chemical weapons. They could be a “showstopper.” “The chemical-weapon thing is big. We have reason to believe that the chemical weapons are with the forward artillery units that are targeting Seoul. If we don’t get those early, we end up with chemicals on Seoul.”
Gardiner later talked about timing. As time passes and North Korea develops more nuclear weapons, “the targeting challenges for the U.S. military grow considerably. It’s hard enough to take out one or two – or eight or ten – nuclear devices if we don’t know exactly where they are. The task of destroying fifteen or twenty, or eighty or a hundred, before any of them can be launched becomes substantially harder. And the threat that one of them will be sold to a terrorist greatly increases.” [Scott Stossel]
Kay commented on the results of a collapse in the regime. “The collapse of a nuclear, chemical, and biologically armed state is a serious national-security threat not just for us but for the whole world. We ought to have a contingency plan for what happens if that regime collapses. Because if you don’t, Iraq is going to look like child’s play.”
Everyone agreed the U.S. military could not afford the troop numbers required to effectively wage war in North Korea, let alone the aftermath.
Army Major Donald Vandergriff worried the U.S. would be caught off guard by a surprise attack on the South. [Think Pearl Harbor and 9/11, as well as the invasion by North Korea in 1950.] And, he observed, “What if North Korea doesn’t even try to fight a conventional war but resorts instead to ‘fourth- generation war,’ relying heavily on commandoes, assassins, and sleeper cells in the South?”
In the end, reporter Stossel asked the participants of the war game what other conclusions could be reached. David Kay told him, “Anyone who walks through the North Korea crisis comes through absolutely convinced that it is only going to get worse.” Stossel writes Kay “came away from the exercise convinced of the situation’s urgency – and convinced that the United States has wasted several years, effectively dong nothing while it hoped the regime would collapse. Kay believes that the administration’s reluctance to engage the matter diplomatically is dangerous.” At least two other principals agreed we need to negotiate directly. Colonel Gardiner said “The military situation on the peninsula is not under control.”
Hott Spotts will return July 14. More thoughts on North Korea.
Brian Trumbore
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