So, 80,000 artillery pieces in groups of, say 4, divided by 5, multiplied by 10, equals… 40,000 bombers for a simultaneous strike aiming to knock out NKs artillery/rocket capability, to protect Seoul. That presumes that they’re significantly successful (i.e., that the NK artillery isn’t sufficiently mobile or dug-in to withstand a strike), and that the delay for any group of 50 planes between first and fifth target isn’t sufficient to allow Kim to transmit orders to fire everything at once.
Doesn’t sound like a hopeful operation to me, even if it were plausible to launch it in the first place. Nukes won’t fly either, because you would need to blanket the area where artillery might be located–you can’t just set off one or two, you’d need to glass a zone that’s only 20-30 kms from Seoul. I don’t think the South Koreans would be happy with a nuclear barrage that close to their most populous city.
But the whole point of your idea is to do it before they have the opportunity to provoke us - killing their artillery before they shell Seoul into oblivion.
So? Starting a war and using that war as an excuse to pre-emptively nuke the victim’s defences still makes you the bad guy.
I would expect and hope that we already have missiles and/or artillery of our own in place targeted on all of the artillery we already know about, plus more that can be targeted on the fly to any we don’t know about, and that if any of the artillery started firing, that we’d immediately launch all of those missiles. We could probably mitigate the damage to some extent. But even in the best case scenario, each of those artillery pieces is going to get off a few shots, and Seoul’s going to take a lot of damage.
Is North Korea guaranteed to shell Seoul? Just because they can doesn’t mean they will. Think of David and Goliath (with NK playing the role of David). You can smash Goliath in the forehead with a rock and hope to slow him down or you can toss the rock right past him and break a window at his house which might piss him off but won’t slow him down one bit. So if I’m a commander of field guns in North Korea and I know my lifespan is measured in minutes to hours I’m going to point and fire my guns at things that shoot back first. Your artillery may vary.
The best strategy is to infiltrate the country with SC magazines. Doesn’t matter what it’s a magazine of. Once the NK people understand just how fucked up their country is the mutiny will come from within.`
First, in any conflict between the Koreas, massive damage/casualties to Seoul ties up a lot of South Korean resources–perhaps a disproportionate amount, given Seoul’s importance. Tactically it’s a sound move.
Second, if you have 80,000 artillery and rocket batteries pre-positioned to bombard Seoul, you know that they’ll be a primary target at the beginning of any conflict. They might survive the first 24 hours, depending on a lot of factors, but you can be guaranteed they won’t survive the first week, so there’s a “use it or lose it” aspect to them. If they’re dug in, they can’t be easily repositioned either–it’s not like you can task them to anything but the destruction of Seoul.
[Aside: anyone have a good idea what proportion of that artillery is mobile artillery vs. dug-in?]
Third, causing massive casualties in Seoul will be a huge blow to the morale of the SKs and the USians, which is another opportunity the NKs wouldn’t want to pass up.
Lastly, after the war, when either North Korea is part of South Korea (or the reverse), a free-standing and unharmed Seoul will be directly compared to conditions in the north. Tarnishing that bright jewel has its advantages, and Seoul’s integration with the world is about the companies and people, not about the infrastructure. There’s no great argument for the NKs for preserving Seoul because there’s little they can actually use there after a conflict, assuming they win (which I’m sure the NKs are planning on).
The people have been thoroughly propagandized into believing America is always planning a takeover of N. Korea. They are taught we want to kill them for no reason. We are completely demonized and they would run from us like evil space aliens had landed.
The reason they are starving and dirt poor is because of us. They would have riches if we didn’t prevent it.
Artillery has limited capability in this scenario. All they can do with it is break things because it would be easy for people to locate beyond their range. In the mean time, they would be hunted/destroyed in what would amount to a bloodbath because NK would immediately lose control the air. It would be a systematic slice and dice of their communications system, radar system, and machines of war. Their best offense is in the numbers of boots that can pour over the border which again, would be a bloodbath without air support. Their artillery is the modern version of the Maginot Line.
No, they are a modern version of MAD. You are wildly overestimating how fast people can be made to leave such a huge metropolis. You are also ignoring the likelihood that in such a tense situation, even trying to evacuate would likely to cause them to open fire.
You’re putting words in my mouth. Unlike a barrage of nuclear missiles, artillery is a weapon that takes several hours to play out. What I was “proposing” was a nuclear strike after N.K. began an artillery strike but before most of the damage was done.
I can’t speculate on NK artillery’s rate of fire, etc., nor on the delay of U.S. nuclear bomb delivery, but it seems likely to me, especially since spy satellites would probably detect moves toward attack, that a sufficient response could suppress the artillery while a large majority of rounds are still unfired, even though Presidential OK would wait till the (hypothetical) NK attack began.
I doubt there’d be any visible moves to attack since the artillery is pre-positioned and dug in. And I doubt that stopping the majority of the shells from being fired would be good enough to keep the city from devastation.
“I can’t speculate on NK artillery’s rate of fire, etc., nor on the delay of U.S. nuclear bomb delivery, but it seems likely to me, especially since spy satellites would probably detect moves toward attack, that a sufficient response could suppress the artillery while a large majority of rounds are still unfired, even though Presidential OK would wait till the (hypothetical) NK attack began.”
As said earlier, any nuclear attack achieving this would have the slight issue of happening right next to Seoul. Theres no point saving the city if noone can safely live in it afterwards. Also theres lots of people next to the border who would be hit by said nukes.
Also there is the other slight issue of nerve gas and biological weapons being thought to be part of the NK artillery. Getting ‘most’ would still probably result in a rather scary death toll, even without nukes or dirty weapons being involved as is now also a possibility.
They must have some response planned, but Id be surprised if it didnt include the assumption of very large death tolls for Seoul regardless of whats done.
What you want to have happen: the US nukes North Korean artillery positions, thus saving the lives of hundreds of thousands in Seoul. What would actually happen: the US pops dozens of 20kt-150kt or so tactical nukes within 20 miles or so of Seoul. The half of Seoul’s population that doesn’t drop dead from radiation poisoning over the next month doesn’t regard us as thier saviours for some odd reason. To add to the fun, before every single gun and multiple rocket launcher is silenced, the North Koreans treat Seoul to phosgene, mustard, and nerve gasses.
They already get propaganda radio broadcasts over the border and black-market cell phones from China. The message is there. The problem is that the government propaganda overwhelms it. Many North Koreans live in this weird mindstate where they understand how miserable their country is and how much prosperity exists elsewhere, but they never make the connection that their government is one giant fraud.
It’s one thing to think that your government is incompetent and maybe a little extortionary. But it’s extremely difficult for a person to accept that a government can get (and has gotten) away with pulling off fraud on such a titanic scale, and that they individually and personally helped by swallowing what turns out to be some pretty ludicrous propaganda.
I’m starting to think that maybe Americans need to be involved in a war for real, not just export it to other countries.
Americans went crazy when 9/11 happened and let’s face it, that’s just one attack (well two if you count Pentagon) with a very limited number of casualties. Not a big deal at all in war-terms. Imagine 9/11 happening in at least a hundred US cities. Or lets say 1% of the population dying. That would be 3 million people. Fairly reasonable for a war. But lets make at least half the population live wihout safe access to electricity, food and clean water.
If we would take 9/11, the Washington sniper and everything else bad that happened for the last decade and multiply it by a hundred. Maybe then the American people would get a reasonable relation to war, what war is, and exactly how much you should be trying to avoid it.
You’re not wrong. The comment on page 1 about the evil propaganda being fed to NK about the US wanting to invade seems somewhat ironic in the context of this thread. It’s like there’s no real comprehension, despite the evidence of the last 10 years, that invasions, wars and conflicts do little to solve problems, but plenty to create them - yet the overriding philosophy still seems to be 'nuke ‘em from orbit’.