Hypothetical: The US president decides that a NK with nuclear missiles aimed at the US mainland is unacceptable and that a preemptive attack is the only option.
Estimates show that no matter how we execute our preemptive strike it’s likely that a 100,000 Seoul residents will be killed or wounded within the first few hours.
The US notifies SK that an attack will happen within the hour and to evacuate as many people as possible from the city. NK is going to be watching for this of course.
Do you think a mass evacuation of Seoul would trigger a preemptive attack by NK, or would NK likely wait for an actual attack on them before attacking?
Do you think the US would launch its preemptive attack without giving Seoul a chance to evacuate in order to maintain the element of surprise?
I’m assuming they don’t have shelters for 10 million people, but even if they do NK will certainly notice if everyone starts heading to a shelter, so the same questions would apply.
Metropolitan Seoul has about 25 million people in 4500 sq. mi., about 80% the size of the Connecticut. What makes you think that North Korea is going to politely limit its strikes to the downtown area? Even if by some fluke of idiot planning, they concentrated entirely on the densest city areas, and people somehow knew this, it would be worse. It takes two hours to get from New York City to eastern Connecticut on I-95 on an average day. Rush hour delays can push that over two hours much closer in. So the best case scenario on the best road is beyond your deadline. Any real panic would shut down all roads at once.
Mass evacuation of metropolitan areas is a fantasy.
I would hazard a guess that if NK got indications that everyone in Seoul was heading towards shelters (or as many as could), that would be strong indication that NK was about to be attacked. Probably not a good sign.
If most people in Seoul evacuate, what stops the north from moving in conventionally and occupying it, threatening the south with a nuclear hit if they try to take it back?
There would still be a lot of military resistance before they could get to the city. And, as said, it’s a huge city. It’s been a long time but I’ve been there, and there is military presence in the city outskirts
Also, as Exapno Mapcase said, evacuating urban areas is a fantasy.
The people staying in Seoul would be the military, and unless the NKA was already staged, they couldn’t get through the DMZ fast enough. Besides, how do you “occupy” 4500 sq. Miles of territory that fast with necessarily small numbers of troops?
The unarmed civilian population of Seoul is not going to do much good resisting a hypothetical invading North Korean army. That will be up to the South Korean army. If the South Korean army is relying on the civilian population to get out their deer rifles to resist the North, then they’re going to be very disappointed.
Well, what constitutes a “shelter”? Do most buildings in Seoul have basements? Or interior rooms without windows, such as Plains Americans would go to in event of a tornado? Neither of those will save you from a direct artillery hit, but both would save a lot of lives in the splash zones.
Depends on how much time. On 9/11 Lower Manhattan was evacuated amazingly fast. A large part by a spontaneous boat evacuation of 500,000 and by all other means possible. No one would have believed it was possible to move that many people out of Manhattan that fast before it happened. So complete evacuation no, but hopefully we will be surprised by how many can get out.
Attempting to evacuate Seoul with just one hour to do might actually result in more causalities than not saying anything because with an evacuation you’ll have people outside, where they’re more vulnerable, and getting into accidents and arguments and panicking and all sorts of chaos.
I’m not saying it would, just that you shouldn’t assume an evacuation is going to go smoothly, move any significant people in an hour, and being outside during bombardment (because you got caught in the evacuation traffic jam) isn’t going to end well for a lot of people.
Or maybe everyone involved cooperates, keeps their head, and you move a surprising number of people in that time frame, with everyone spending the last 10 minutes seeking shelter. We just don’t know.
That was the evacuation of a population equation to 2% of greater Seoul from an area of less than 10 sq. mi. (again about 2%) over the course of a day rather than an hour. I’m not seeing the equivalence.
There’s an old joke about a farm boy lifting a calf every day from the time of its birth and so developing his muscles that he could still do it when it was a full grown bull. That’s literal bull, and that impossible extrapolation is the same kind of thinking you’re doing.
That’s where the US has another edge to destroy an invasion; apart from present enormous mass and present overwhelming military force, the People are armed and will resist with rifles, shotguns and handguns; turning out instantly to repel all comers and destroy the enemy.
Potentially interfering also with urgent troop movement and redeployment. When about to repel an invasion you want your soldiers taking their places manning the lines, not herding civilians.
OK, but where are you going to evacuate 500,000 people to? Evacuating part of lower Manhattan a couple of miles across the Hudson and East Rivers is one thing, but that distance in Seoul is only going to move people out of range of one set of artillery and rockets into range of a different set.
Yes, and it’s possible that South Korea’s mobilization plans involve the use of the civilian transportation system. An evacuation will be even harder if all the buses, trains, and main roadways are commandeered to move the army north.