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North Korea Could Unleash 'Catastrophic Destruction'

2 years ago

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While Iran's political drama intensifies, the U.S. military is keeping a hard eye on North Korea – a far more immediate and unpredictable menace.

Much of North Korea's vast (1.2 million active-duty) army has fallen into disrepair. It is critically short on spare parts, fuel and training.

But the North still could unleash "lethal, catastrophic destruction'' on South Korea and beyond, and it could do so "with little or no warning,'' U.S. Army Gen. Walter "Skip" Sharp, the top U.S. commander in Korea, said recently.

Standing in the way: 28,500 American troops and 4,000 of their family members stationed in South Korea.

The U.S. eventually would win, of course, with its ability to vector in strike fighters and long-range bombers and to airlift in additional troops. But it could be a bloody and destructive fight that would leave much of the Korean peninsula a smoking ruin, even if the regime in North Korea didn't use its nuclear weapons.

For starters, the North has trained 250 long-range artillery pieces on Seoul, barely 30 miles south of the DMZ. Imagine salvos of artillery shells suddenly crashing into the glass-sheathed skyscrapers of downtown Seoul at rush hour, creating blizzards of lethal shards and firestorms of collapsing buildings.

That's a horrifying potential consequence of the high-stakes maneuvering currently underway. North Korea continues to build nuclear weapons, develop long-range missiles that could reach the continental United States within three years, and sell its ballistic missiles and weapons technology to other "rogue" states such as Iran.

The United States leads a reluctant alliance trying to stop it with counter-threats and United Nations banking and trade sanctions.

This week the United States and other countries said they would begin enforcing new UN sanctions by attempting to inspect North Korean cargo ships suspected of carrying arms or other banned material.

North Korea threatened to launch immediate strikes if its ships are touched.

Heightening the confrontation, the North is holding two U.S. journalists it says it caught spying, and the reclusive regime is in the midst of a tricky transfer of power from aging strongman Kim Jong-il, who recently suffered a stroke, to his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, who is virtually unknown outside Pyongyang.

The slow-motion collapse of the North's economy has increased the potential for instability, U.S. intelligence officials say.

If North Korea detonates trouble across the fortified DMZ, Gen. Sharp says the American and South Korean (ROK) forces under his command can "decisively defeat a North Korea attack.''

War would require "significant'' U.S. reinforcements, though, and Sharp acknowledges that he needs more air and naval assets, which might be slow in coming.

In a conflict ignited by a surprise North Korean attack, for example, it would take U.S.-based long-range bombers 19 or 20 hours to close on their targets, Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week.

Speaking in general terms and not specifically about Korea, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that "most of the conflict is over before our conventional forces can close'' on the fight.

Another issue is that missile attacks or North Korean commandos could cut off U.S. military communications. Improvements to fix that problem are underway and will be completed "by the end of 2012,'' Sharp told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March. He also said he could use more multiple rocket launchers, precision munitions to blast hardened and deeply buried targets, and more precision air-delivered weapons.

Will the worst happen?

What keeps this week's confrontation so tense is that no one knows what might cause the North to suddenly lash out. U.S. intelligence can penetrate only so far into the secretive police state, and U.S. intelligence reports are studded with caveats like "possibly'' and "it seems likely.''

Notice how Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence and the nation's top intelligence officer, phrased this critical analysis:

"Pyongyang probably would not attempt to use nuclear weapons against U.S. forces unless it perceived the regime to be on the verge of military defeat . . .'' Blair reported this in his annual threat assessment this spring (emphasis added).

Filed Under: Foreign Policy

Tagged: Military, North Korea, NorthKorea, Nuclear, South Korea, SouthKorea

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