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Miscalculation the greatest Korea
war risk
By Marc Erikson
Part 1: Can
catastrophic Korean war be avoided?
Numerous, perhaps most, wars in history have
started as the result of misestimation of enemy
intentions and strength, uncontrolled and reckless
escalation of tension, or sheer accident. Should war
break out again on the Korean Peninsula, it will be no
different.
As I wrote in the first installment
of this two-part effort at defining war risk, the stage
for any and all of the above factors to come into play
is set by the - as currently stated - irreconcilable
aims of the United States and North Korea in their
five-month standoff. The US, feeling betrayed by North
Korea's flagrant and admitted violations of the 1994
nuclear-freeze-for-food-and-energy Agreed Framework,
seeks total North Korean nuclear disarmament. North
Korea, accusing the US of not keeping its part of the
bargain, seeks iron-clad guarantees for its security and
regime survival and regards becoming a declared and
capable nuclear power as the surest way of achieving its
security goals.
As North Korea escalates its
provocative actions to get US and world attention and
force bilateral non-aggression-pact negotiation with the
United States, chance or deliberate military encounters
could rapidly lead to larger-scale military action. As
talk in and around the US administration of President
George W Bush of a surgical special-ops strike to take
out North Korean nuclear installations, buttressed by
dismissive chatter of North Korea's military as a paper
tiger, gains prominence, full-scale war risk increases.
I am not predicting war. Neither Washington nor
Pyongyang has anything to gain from such a catastrophic
event. The probability of full-scale open hostilities
remains low. But if and when the US finishes its Iraq
campaign and focuses on Korea, risk will increase
substantially - principally as the result of
miscalculation.
Let's look in some detail at
North Korean military capabilities to lay to rest the
dangerous "paper tiger" nonsense. There is no doubt that
a full-scale combined US-South Korean assault on the
North would ultimately lead to military victory. There
can equally be no doubt that such victory would come at
catastrophic cost to the people and infrastructure of
the Korean Peninsula, at very large potential cost to
Japan, and at immense damage to the regional and global
economies. Even without nuclear weapons, North Korea's
retaliatory or preemptive offensive capabilities are
sufficient to inflict unacceptable losses on any
would-be attacker. And based on its military doctrine,
inferred from deployment of forces and years of
observation of large- and smaller-scale military
exercises, there can be no question that these
capabilities would be used to the fullest.
Level
1 of deterrence or attack potential is defined by the
combined destructive potential of 700 currently deployed
shorter- and medium-range ballistic missiles (600
300-500-kilometer-range Scud B/Cs, 100
1,300-1,500km-range Nodongs), several (two to six)
nuclear warheads, and a minimum of 500, more likely
several thousand, tonnes of chemical and biological
agents. The Scuds cover most, the Nodongs all of South
Korea's population centers; the Nodongs most of Japan's.
Level 2 comprises 500 long-range artillery
pieces (170mm Koksan guns) and 2,500 multiple rocket
launchers, 4,000 tanks, and 70 percent of the standing
army of 1.1 million, all forward-deployed at or within
100km of the Demilitarized Zone. The Koksan guns alone
can unleash 500,000 rounds of heavy munitions per hour
on Seoul and other places just south of the DMZ. Massed
tank forces and mechanized infantry would at least
initially be capable of overwhelming US/South Korean
defenders near the DMZ.
Level 3 comprises
strategic reserves of the remainder of the standing army
and readily mobilized reserve forces of at least
600,000. In addition, three special-forces groups of
unknown personnel strength stand ready to be infiltrated
into the South through tunnels or by sea, and submarine
forces (the world's third-largest, with 26 Russian
Kilo-class diesel-electrics and 40 minisubs) pose a
credible threat to attacking or blockading surface
combatants, as do recently tested land-based 160km-range
anti-ship cruise missiles. One significant point of
vulnerability is the technical inferiority of the air
force, which likely would have to surrender air-space
control within days of the commencement of military
action.
That notwithstanding, the attack
potential and forces mix of North Korea's military are
formidable. These forces would not stay in fixed
positions waiting to be attacked. Derived from Soviet
military doctrine, North Korea's stresses high-mobility,
massed fire-power and combined-arms offensive
maneuvering, and has more recently emphasized
integration of asymmetric warfare operations. Rapid
strikes from the standstill are well within the army's
capability and would aim to seize the initiative and
strategic territory before US reinforcements could
arrive on the scene.
And the best/worst is yet
to come. A former Indian army chief has said that the
principal lesson any nation should learn from the Gulf
War is that it is futile to take on the United States
before being in possession of nuclear weapons. The logic
of that will not have been lost on North Korean military
leaders. They know that massed attack on the South after
initial success would likely be countered by US tactical
nukes. The only defense against that is to deter it by
one's own nuclear arsenal. Thus probably the urgency
with which North Korea undertook nuclear-weapons
development in the early 1990s, which led to the 1993-94
crisis, temporarily resolved by the October 1994 signing
of the Agreed Framework.
But prior to that,
North Korea had extracted somewhere between eight and 24
kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium from spent fuel
rods of the five-megawatt Yongbyon reactor - at an
average rate of four kilograms per nuclear weapon,
yielding the above two-to-six-warheads estimate. A total
of 8,000 fuel rods remain unprocessed and could yield
another six weapons within six months of restart of the
Yongbyon reprocessing line. Moreover, with the small
Yongbyon reactor now running again and a larger 50MW one
under construction and capable of being completed in a
year's time, North Korea, starting some time in the next
year, could gear up to producing 20-50 nukes per year
and rapidly become the world's ninth nuclear power. And
this doesn't count weapons made from enriched uranium,
facilities for the production of which North Korea
apparently imported from Pakistan starting in 1997. US
assistant secretary of state James Kelly just told a
Senate committee that those facilities could produce
weapons-grade uranium in a matter of months, not years
as earlier thought.
So forget about forcibly
dismantling North Korea's nuclear-production facilities.
Any such attempt would lead to catastrophic war. In
order to freeze once again and perhaps later agree to
dismantle its nuclear program, North Korea wants
iron-clad security guarantees. But who can or is
credibly prepared to deliver such binding guarantees?
Who, in turn, will believe or vouchsafe that Pyongyang
does not once again start clandestine nuclear
activities?
To my mind, the only no-war outcome
as events unfold over coming months may well be US and
international-community acceptance of North Korea as a
declared nuclear state in return for enforceable
non-proliferation guarantees. But such an outcome, if
feasible at all, is likely years rather than months
away. In the meantime, war risk will fluctuate, but
instead of going away, will on average continue to
increase. As this plays out, miscalculation and
accidents could at any time transform tense standoff
into hot conflict.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
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