China has a lower population density than North Korea.
It’s my understanding that the population density of China is highly variable across its territory, and you can’t really judge how crowded it is just going by the average.
Yeah, it’s partly a misleading statistic, because, as you mentioned, a lot of it is desert and mountain. It’s not to say that they couldn’t develop a lot of those areas if they wanted to, (Which is what they’re doing with Tibet. The government sponsored massive migration into Tibet in the 80s and 90s, both to settle population pressure and make the area more loyal), but it would be expensive.
The comment was partially tongue in cheek, but there’s also, I think this lack of understanding about just how big and spread out China really is.
Wow. That is scary.
Let’s try to keep discussions of North Korea buried in the factual. North Korea has no capacity to blow Japan or South Korea off the face of the earth that has been demonstrated thus far. At best they have half a dozen sub-100 Kt yield nuclear weapons without a clear or confirmed missile delivery system. Their planes could never penetrate a modern air defense setup so bombers are also out. So you’re left with some sort of terrorist activity, but note that the first weapons the North Koreans built are probably 10,000 + lbs as that’s how big the first nuclear weapons we built were. There’s a reason we noticed when the Soviets were moving nuclear weapons into Cuba, it’s not quite so easy without advanced miniaturization to secretly move a warhead somewhere–which would be North Korea’s best tactic for using one against South Korea or Japan.
Even if they used all six on one of those countries the vast majority of the country’s citizens would still be alive. A sub-100 Kt warhead detonated in Tokyo would probably only kill 10% of greater Tokyo’s population. It’s a really big area, and sub-100 Kt isn’t as large an explosion as people believe.
I don’t know when nuclear weapon in peoples minds became synonymous with the massive 40-50 km kill zone 15-20 Mt monsters that we built en masse at the height of the Cold War, but weapons like that are very rare now and basically only us and the Russians have any. Even the US and Russia have decommissioned most warheads of that size.
As for concerns about artillery “wiping Seoul off the face of the earth”, a lot of the artillery in question actually can’t directly hit Seoul, and northern Seoul is considered the area that will receive the vast majority of the shelling. Also, artillery isn’t like a missile silo, for it to be effective it has to basically be at least partially exposed so hardening and concealment just makes it a bit harder to hit, not impossible.
We have very large air burst weaponry and very powerful penetrator bombs, both would be used against North Korea’s artillery. The air burst would basically make the entire area a firestorm so no one can move around, that’s very bad from a tactical perspective. The penetrators kill the artillery and their crew.
I compared the likely effects of massive artillery bombardment to the massive firebombing of Tokyo in another thread. Basically the largest conventional bombing in history was one day in Tokyo when we killed about 90,000 Japanese and destroyed 250,000 buildings and displaced around a million. My estimate for absolute worst case scenario number of deaths from artillery in Seoul would be 100,000 and that’s basically taking what I think the number would really be (around 20,000 maximum) and multiplying it by five just to be very conservative.
A few hundred thousand saboteurs in Japan are farcical, North Korea has carried out clandestine activities in Japan for many years and would almost certainly have some sabotage crews working in a war but it would not be anywhere near 100k, and probably not even 1000.
It’s widely believed in a war North Korea’s military will be totally operationally ineffective after three days. During that time I’d estimate billions of dollars in damage to infrastructure in Northern Seoul, perhaps a few tens of thousands dead, a few missiles launched at Tokyo (many probably exploding in mid-air as history has shown with the Iranians and others that poorly engineered missiles by tin pot dictatorships tend to have bad aerospace engineers working on them and many don’t have the structural integrity you’d want to see if you were launching them.)
So that leaves the WMD, specifically chemical and nuclear. Chemical weapons are not really as dangerous as most people say on the battlefield, they are bad but they’re a lot scary as terrorist weapons in crowded and enclosed spaces. A chemical warhead can blow up in a city street and depending on which street, how many people were there, how the wind is blowing and etc you could actually get very unlikely and kill no one or very few people.
So that then leaves nuclear weapons. If we go to war I suspect we might be able to eliminate the ability of the North to deploy or use them anywhere but where they are right now. So there’d basically be a few areas in North Korea where we know there’s warheads, the North can’t move them, we maybe can’t kill them with penetrative munitions, and if we approach them with ground troops the North might detonate in suicidal explosions. I don’t know how that gets managed.
That’s the best case scenario.
Worst case scenario is they are able to slip some out somewhere to do something with them, a suicide truck at a military base or somewhere in Seoul, something like that. Maybe they risk slapping a warhead on one of their missiles. For medium range missiles we don’t believe the North has a reliable warhead/delivery pairing yet, but maybe they are willing to risk 1-2 of their warheads in an unreliable missile configuration. Maybe 1-2 hits. If I was talking to the President I would tell him that I feel we have a good chance of avoiding any offensive nuclear detonations, but that if he decides for war he has to accept the idea that it could happen.
Historically we’ve always suspected we either lose Seoul or parts of Seoul in the immediate war if North Korea attacks or even if we attack North Korea. I’ve heard it said in recent years we now believe that may no longer be the case as the U.S. feels it may be able to disrupt offensive with massive air burst weapons and things of that nature which could make any line of attack through the DMZ a suicide shoot-em up situation (similar to the “highway of death” type scenario in the Persian Gulf War.) But anyway, assuming the old calculus remains true, and we do have to yield parts of Northern Seoul and such the fear for me would be a massive truck loaded with one or several of the North Korean warheads rolls in with the military. Then we’ve got basically a nuclear bomb hostage situation near large military bases or in Seoul itself, that’s probably worst case scenario that’s likely to happen. (I consider a successful missile launched nuking of Japan or South Korea to be unlikely but something that must be considered.)
But anyway, I just feel we need to take the most realistic assessment of North Korean capabilities. We need to consider worst case scenarios, but I don’t really understand where a lot of you guys have gotten your “scary” concepts and numbers. The worst case scenario has never been 10-25 m dead South Koreans, or South Korea or Japan “wiped from the face of the Earth.”
But anyway, what I actually said would happen during a war is very, very, very bad. Unacceptable really, the only way it’s acceptable is if we think something much worse would happen otherwise. I don’t think that, and thus I don’t think we should have a war with North Korea.
I think this is basically how we handle North Korea:
-The endless cycle of them creating a crisis to get aid has to stop. The United States needs to recognize that paying the North Koreans does nothing to further our interests or prevent bad behavior by North Korea.
-We only agree to end sanctions in response to North Korea participating in the six-party talks and accepting some rational agreement.
-We need to disallow hostile North Korean action. No more shelling inhabited South Korean islands or sinking South Korean ships. If North Korea does anything like that, we have to respond with an immediate counterattack in proportion to theirs. If this starts a general war that is a tragedy, but if you let a country continually attack your allies without response because you’re afraid of a war then you’re basically ceding your ability to defend your allies. That’s ultimately unacceptable.
-During the Cold War, Kennedy said a nuclear attack from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere would be considered a nuclear attack on the United States by the Soviet Union, and responded to appropriately. We need to devote significant intelligence resources to monitoring any North Korean nuclear weapons deals. It needs to be United States policy that any country that gives nuclear weapons to any other country, is responsible for how that country uses them. If North Korea gives nuclear weapons to Sudan or Iran or something and they use one, we respond to that as if North Korea had nuked the continental United States–meaning full nuclear retaliation.
-Other than that, we wait. It’ll be a long period of hostility and glaring at one another. Just like the Cold War, but luckily with a very small country on one side and us on the other.
This isn’t my playbook, this is the playbook for the Cold War. It worked because the Russians didn’t want to get nuked anymore than we did, and eventually conditions in Russia changed such that it ended the Cold War. I don’t think we have any proactive options that are worth pursuing. Any attack on North Korea entails unacceptable losses–and most importantly, I think as long as we set appropriate boundaries on North Korean action they are no more likely to commit state suicide than Russia was, meaning we don’t need to do anything proactive.
The issue that worries me more than countries like Iran and North Korea getting nuclear weapons and then exporting the technology to other countries is them exporting actual weapons to terrorist groups. We can hold Iran/NK accountable for any State they give a nuclear weapon to, just like we held the Soviets responsible for any Cuban nukes. But a terrorist group? Much harder to hold them accountable to anyone, as we’d have to prove where a nuclear weapon a terrorist group uses came from before a nuclear retaliation would be acceptable. Plus, terrorist groups outside the control of Iran or North Korea ultimately won’t care even if we can trace it back to Iran/North Korea. They don’t care if we attack those countries, because they are a terrorist group, not a State. That’s always been my nightmare scenario with nuclear proliferation, is non-state actors having them as they can never be held accountable to the same degree or bargained with in the same way. In fact I sadly think there is a strong possibility a non-state actor gets a nuclear weapon and uses one some day.
Martin Hyde, excellent post. That makes things sound a little better.
However, do you think a terrorist group would have the funds to actually buy a nuke? I think that would be the major obstacle as compared to an actual state.
Yes, they could. Plus if we’re talking about the Iranians especially a big part of the reason they’d be selling a nuclear warhead to a terrorist group is because they want it to be used against the West or Israel without themselves suffering the nuclear reprisal. So in that mindset Iran has reason to “sell it at a discount” so to speak, or just “gift it” or “have lax security standards that results in a warhead disappearing.”
We’re still removed from that probably by at least 20 years (I hope.) That is how long I think it would probably be before Iran actually has enough of a nuclear program to the point they’d be willing to part with any warheads. North Korea I could see it sometime in the next 10-15. And we’ll certainly see Iran and North Korea probably helping other “bad” actor countries develop nuclear programs. I’m less concerned with that as we can hold Iran and North Korea responsible for any “trainee states” just like we always made it U.S. policy that any countries Russia gave the nuke to we’d treat an attack from them the same as an attack from the Soviets directly.
North Korea is more likely I think to sell nuclear weapons for profiteering motives as the regime there is a bit more cash starved than the Iranians and are always looking for outside currency.
The question is, if Iran or North Korea do get a nuclear weapon in the hands of a terrorist group and we can’t definitively link it back to any specific country after it has been detonated, what do we do? That’s the question that really scares me, because not having an answer to that question is precisely why for enemies of the West it makes sense to do just that and give a nuclear weapon to terrorist groups.
Martin Hyde: Many thanks, indeed, for such a thoughtful and informative set of posts.
If you have the time, would you care to elaborate a bit on the notion of North Korean sleeper cells in South Korea (you’ve already discussed this issue with respect to Japan).
As posts in this thread attest, some estimates of the potential number of such belligerents running amok in South Korea run into the hundreds of thousands. Although that would seem to be an outrageous estimate regarding Japan, is it as far off for South Korea?
Thanks in advance!
And, how do they keep them from defecting?
I don’t think anyone actually knows, I was just basing it off of some conclusions. Okay so firstly this concept of North Korea sleeper cells comes from a program we know that the DPRK ran for many years in which they abducted people from other countries and then forced them to be “teachers” for infiltrators being trained back in North Korea. Japan lost at least 18 or so citizens, 13 of which DPRK acknowledges they kidnapped and a few of whom they returned a few years ago. (One was a girl as young as 13 walking to school that has never been returned and the DPRK claims committed suicide.) But anyway, some Japanese groups have suggested the true number of kidnapped Japanese citizens is far higher, in the hundreds.
However, the Japanese government does not accept anywhere near that many as being DPRK abductions. South Korea’s government generally says several hundred South Koreans have been abducted to the North for similar purposes (although the need for special training to infiltrate the South is lower–learning fluent Japanese is a lot harder for North Koreans than would be North Koreans picking up the modern day slang or whatever from the South that might differentiate their speech patterns.)
Okay so we have several hundred people kidnapped and used we know to train infiltrators. It’s highly unlikely we have something like 200,000 infiltrators if you do simple mathematics. That would be a very large number relative to the total North Korean military, and it’s unlikely North Korea has the resources to have deployed that many agents trained in North Korea all around the world. The United States is the wealthiest country in the world that probably spends more on the CIA than the North Korea does on its military and we do not have anywhere near that many covert agents deployed. [Neither the CIA budget or the North’s military budget is precisely known, but both have recently been estimated at around the $5bn range, as a point of comparison.]
It’s also hard to know what we say when we talk about sleeper agents. Are we talking about North Koreans trained to infiltrate enemy countries and lay there waiting to cause trouble (which we know exist) or are we talking about people in those countries who are basically treasonous and support North Korea? There are probably few to no native Japanese who are involved in such activities while there are certainly probably some North Korean sleeper cells in Japan. In South Korea sadly some of the far extremist communists are still around that actually support North Korea ideologically and may have agreed to work with North Korean agents in South Korea in case of war breaking out. There was a book out awhile back widely considered to be a bit alarmist that made the claim of 10,000 or so people in South Korea (both natives and DPRK agents) who would be working against the South in a general war.
Well, ostensibly the people trained as infiltrators are the most loyal, die hard, trustworthy people. We do know the North Koreans have had covert operatives all around Asia doing stuff.
Now, we also know that some extreme communist South Koreans are idealogical supporters of North Korea. It’s safe to assume a small number of those people have actually made contact with DPRK agents and are counted as “sleeper agents” as well by the DPRK intelligence. Some of them may have received money perhaps, or maybe just have signed on to do whatever in the case of a war breaking out. But some of those might very well stay home if their thus far no-skin involved treason has to convert into a physically risky treason.
Are you sure of it? I would assume that they could at least use them against South Korea and China, and probably Japan…
Not particularly. They have no delivery mechanism. They have missiles. They have nukes. They don’t have missiles that can carry the nukes.
They’d have to load it up in a crate, ship it over clandestinely (presumably without a “contains nuclear weapon” sticker), get it delivered to their target without anybody being the wiser, and arrange for it to explode in a time and manner of their choosing. That’s not currently viable.
Worse yet, they DO manage to do that and their miniscule nuclear stockpile (of what? 2 or 3 weapons) is down 1, and the rest of the world comes in and takes them out.
Bungee cords! DUH!
Since NK no longer even calls itself “Communist,” one wonders why any Marxist True Believer would still have any ideological loyalty to it. There are probably some interesting stories there: Families that were on the Communist side in the 1950s and kept it going as a family tradition . . . Families that were hostile to the SK regime when it was a dictatorship and never got out of the habit of supporting its worst enemy . . . Perhaps some of the anything-has-gotta-be-better contrarians who inevitably will be present in any country that (unlike NK) tolerates some range of dissident thought . . .
What do you suppose the odds are that the ROK knows who are enemy agents and has planned accordingly?
Given the history, I would be surprised if any sleepers could get real far unless they have chemical agents AND ways ti disperse them - dumping 5 gallons of toxin out of your window will be bad news for your neighbors, but not many others.
If they are in the military they could turn their weapons the wrong way, but how many do you suppose are fighter pilots?
Something just occurred to me: everyone seems to be assuming that a North Korea wanting war would open with the nukes. What if they started with conventional weapons, with such devastating effect that war is inevitable, then nuked either troops, Seoul, or whoever supported declaring war?
Not necessarily cause for alarm, but from a classified report we heard today in congressional testimony from the DIA and Chuck Hagel that we now believe North Korea has a viable system for delivering a nuclear warhead by missile.
The DIA and the Chairman JCS didn’t elaborate a lot, when Hagel was pressed as to whether this meant North Korea had a missile that could hit the United States with a warhead he replied no. They did say they believe any delivery system would be unreliable, but that they must conclude “the worst possible case scenario” that they do have a viable missile system even if it isn’t necessarily able to be used reliably.