The fear of any military action involving N-Korea is that their artillery will be able to destroy much of Seoul and probably a significant portion of S-Korea’s other infrastructure as well.
If the US were to target this artillery, which has been constantly reinforced and expanded since the 1950’s, how much could this degrade N-Korea’s ability to effectively destroy the country of S-Korea? There is no question that today this is easier than tomorrow, nor that some time (soon) the nuclear angle means near total annihilation - but are we already past the point where any military action means the destruction of S-Korea?
The question isn’t preventing the destruction of South Korea. The question is “how many of the 25 million people in Seoul, is the US willing to sacrifice?”
Assume only 10% could be killed by a complete artillery bombardment, so 2.5 million dead. So now consider the US/S.Korea attack manages to reduce North Korea’s artillery compliment to 25% effectiveness and you only have 650,000 dead.
Leave aside the destruction and economic damage to a prime US ally in the region - is it worth it? If it isn’t then you have to either deal with an nuclear armed N.Korea or develop some approach where disarmament of N.Korea is possible. I suppose you could arm Japan and S.Korea with nuclear weapons and so apply pressure to China but that likely ramps up an arms race in an already tense region.
Very little. North Korea has been digging in for six decades to deal with the sizeable air threat. HARTS (Hardened Artillery Sites) are tough to kill. We simply don’t have the capacity to kill that many hard targets in the short window of a surprise attack.
Slime and cluster munitions/air-scatter-able mines. Probably some ground penetrating nukes too. Really depends on how many people in the northern suburbs of Seoul the U.S. feels like trading for a new NK government that won’t pursue nuclear tipped ICBMs.
There was a semi-recent MIIS public study looking at casualty projections from a NK artillery barrage. (Never mind, it was this one from a conference in Tokyo, 2011.) The consensus of the projections was that it was much smaller than the lurid 100s of thousands dead, but still on the order of 1-10k civilian dead. Which makes me sound like Gen. Ripper typing it out, but still. IIRC, that study did not model the US/SK using persistent chemical weapons on artillery within the 5km-50km of the DMZ fan that concerns Seoul.
It’d still result in billions of USD damage, and that’s not counting the costs of reunification. Still cheaper to the US than a small multi-stage device going off in Honolulu or Seattle.
Note that DinoR’s cite, although high quality, is from 1986. In the intervening 30 years the NKs have made great progress on building more. At the same time the US/SK has made great progress in PGMs.
The punchline is really what **Grey *said: A decision by the US/SK to open hostilities is a decision to kill a nontrivial chunk of the Seoul area populace and make a real mess of their country. You’re not going to get a sane democracy to make a decision like that.
- I went back after and added the word “sane” after thinking hard about the current US NCA. And I’m not proud in the least that I had to make that edit.
Which means that if it happens, we can safely assume the US made the decision for the SKs.
Setting aside that funding for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator was cancelled in the FY2006 budget, defending South Korea and Japan by showering both nations with hundreds of tons of highly radioactive fallout is a solution worse than the problem it ostensibly addresses. Cluster bombs and anti-personnel mines are area denial weapons that are going to be of virtually no effectiveness against hardened artillery sites. There is no open conflict with North Korea that doesn’t turn very badly on the population of South Korea even without bringing nuclear weapons into the calculus.
Stranger
There are weapons that can hit and destroy such hardened sites, right? The US just doesn’t have anywhere near enough of them, nor the capacity to deploy enough of them in a single simultaneous strike to take out the artillery, as far as I’m aware.
So, in a way, the question could be re-asked as: if the US decided to do a first-strike against North Korea and take out their artillery, how long would it take to construct and deploy the munitions and delivery systems needed, assuming a generous budget was thrown at it?
Note that the following analysis is based on NK starting the hostilities. If the US pre-empts, the effectiveness of NK barrage would be a lot lower.
http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-special-reports/mind-the-gap-between-rhetoric-and-reality/
“If the North Korean Peoples Army (KPA) were to start a doctrinal, conventional artillery barrage focused on South Korean forces, we could expect to see around three thousand casualties in the first few minutes, but the casualty rate would quickly drop as the surprise wears off and counter-battery fires slow down the North Korean rates of fire. If the KPA were to engage Seoul in a primarily counter-value fashion by firing into Seoul instead of primarily aiming at military targets, there would likely be around thirty-thousand casualties in a short amount of time. Statistically speaking, almost eight-hundred of those casualties would be foreigners given Seoul’s international demographic. Chinese make up almost seventy percent of foreigners in Seoul and its northern environs which means KPA might also kill six-hundred Chinese diplomats, multi-national corporation leaders, and ranking cadre children who are students in Seoul. Horrible, but nothing approaching “millions”.”
The only ordnance devices in the US arsenal capable of such deep penetration strikes are the GBU-28 and GBU-57 ‘Massive Ordnance Penetrator’. Although there are a limited number of these weapons in inventory, they aren’t particularly difficult to construct, delivery is a problem; the GBU-28 can be delivered by the F-15E ‘Strike Eagle’, thr GBU-57 can only be delivered by the B-2 ‘Spirit’. The vast complex of highly protected artillery that North Korea has amassed within range of Seoul and Inchon would barely be dented even by a coordinated full strike with all available weapons and delivery systems.
Stranger
Mod 11 and 12 for the B-61 have a limited earth-penetrating capability. That, coupled with dial-a-yield to 0.3 kilotons, should lessen the amount of fallout. A nuclear version of a GBU-28 or -57 (which is what I think the RNP was supposed to be) would be better, true, but the above mentioned capability exists for any bunker group sufficiently robust and dispersed to require it.
As to the effectiveness of CBUs, I am not envisioning them being used against a concrete and steel turret or casement. Rather instead, the pad, tunnel entrance or service roads that many of NK’s MLRS (which are the main components that actually have the 60 km+ range to hit even the northern parts of Seoul) would need to traverse to actually employ their weapons. Or even regular tube artillery emplacements with limited overhead cover
But yeah, as you note, CBU bomblets shouldn’t do much to something that looks like a coast defense rifle emplacement on Ft. Drum. The US has other things for those types of emplacements, which in any event aren’t the majority for the tubes facing Seoul.
Ultimately though, we are coming at this from different perspectives, judging by your statement, “defending South Korea and Japan by showering both nations with hundreds of tons of highly radioactive fallout is a solution worse than the problem it ostensibly addresses.” Striking North Korea is not about defending Japan or South Korea. It is about removing the capability of a psychopath to inflict tens of thousands of deaths and billions of dollars of damage to the United States. Which he may very well do anyway whether or not the US attacks him, if he feels that threatening to use those weapons in order to extort the West, is the only way to keep his populace from eating him. (Cue “Madman Theory” retrospectives.)
If using nuclear weapons upon North Korea is the only way to make sure that Seattle doesn’t disappear under a nuclear mushroom, then using them from the US’s perspective is a better choice then not using them, whether the fallout contaminates South Korea and Japan or not.
I don’t think it’ll get to that point, even should the US strike NK, which I think is extremely unlikely, despite the OP. Though I do expect to see chemical weapons used, on both sides. We know he has VX at least. For the US, we haven’t thrown all of them away yet and they are some of the only things I can think of that can slow the NK artillery crews down.
Yes, you are coming at this from the perspective that it is better to kill tens of thousands of South Koreans with radioactive fallout or nerve gas in order to protect the United States against a hypothetical North Korean ICBM armed with a high yield nuclear weapon that does not and likely never exist. This is a cravenly fatuous and shortsighted policy that has us embroiled in endless conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan combined with a complete disregard for blowback. And the “Madman Theory” of strategic deterrence has no credibility whatsoever; even Henry Kissinger, who believes in all sorts of stupid things, thought Nixon was being obtuse for suggesting that being unpredictible and mercurial was a useful strategy. This kind of thinking doesn’t belong on any conflict outside of a playground.
Stranger
The current wind direction actually looks relatively favorable for a 1.2 Mt surface burst at the approximate location for some of the hardened sites threatening Seoul.
Plus, we finally get that radioactive border line, like MacArthur wanted! If slightly in the wrong place. And tragically lacking Cobalt, of course.
Damn. And I thought I went to a tough school.
Is there any way at all to quietly evacuate a lot of South Koreans from the most vulnerable areas? I realize that we’re talking about 25 million people, but if they leave in a slow trickle to temporary residences in the south, maybe over the course of a few months, you have a greatly reduced level of carnage.
And the economy of the country continues on its merry way? The greater Seoul area makes up 50% of SK’s population. Go and evacuate NY, LA and Dallas/Fort Worth and Chicago over 3 months and tell me how the US economy would react. By the way, that’s only about 10-15% of the US’ population.
I’m not insensitive to that, but an attack by the North will kill the economy as well. Better that economy only suffers, rather than economy and lives (to the best of our ability to save them), right?
And, a) in this day and age, a lot (obviously not all) of economic activity is on line and can be moved to another location, as long as there’s internet access b) money is a fungible commodity and aid can be provided to help ameliorate an economic hit.
Or *far *better yet, you don’t kick the hornet’s nest until you absolutely need to. Which is to say until there is absolutely no alternative whatsoever. Or they start it for you.
(post shortened)
If N-Korea’s glorious leader had a very real and justifiable fear that any artillery attack against any of it’s neighbors would definitely result in a nuclear leveling of every possible place in N-Korea where he may chose to hide, he would lose any itch he may have had for attacking S-Korea.
If glorious leader is under the impression that no other nation will respond, or that hundred of thousands of troops will be sent against millions of N-Koreans, Capt Nutso may decide that an artillery attack against S-Korea is worth the risk. IMHO, of course.
Although the situation is not a perfect analogue, there are a lot of valid comparisons here to the situation with East and West Germany, circa 1958–61 over the disposition of Berlin, which the Soviet Union was demanding an end to the “Four Powers” agreement and that access to West Berlin be handed over to East Germany, effectively giving up control over the Western sector. Many military leaders such as Curtis ‘Bombs Away’ LeMay actually advocated preemptive nuclear strikes to ‘secure’ West Berlin, even if it meant turning Berlin and a good chunk of Germany into radioactive glass, which is sort of like starting a charity called “Rapists for Virginity”, i.e. it would be a stupidly contraproductive stategy that only served the ends of people looking forward to a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union “before they get too strong to defeat.”. As history showed us, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed essentially all on its own without military intervention primarily due to the non-viability of their politico-economic system.
Here is the thing about the United States preemptively attacking North Korea: this is precisely what President Xi Jinping and the PRC leadership want, and why they’ve been so willing to sponsor and protect North Korea despite widespread international disapproval. If the US acts unilaterally without the support of other Asian nations and things go sideways as they have in every significant international conflict the US has engaged in in the last twenty years, the US will lose influence and possibly even all support of allies in the region, handing over control to China. To attack North Korea without substantial and unquestionable provocation, regardless of the immediate outcome, would a.most certainly be a geopolitical loss for the US.
As for the unilateral use of nuclear weapons, even in a supposed tactical sense, the conventional doctrine of strategic deterrence is that nuclear weapons are such a last resort that a nuclear-armed power will do anything it can to avert their use. That this may well be a convenient fiction is beside the point; it is what nations have bought into and why the US, Britian, France, Russia, China, India, and Pakistan maintain substantial arsenals of nuclear weapons and delivery systems without the world having to fear the humanitarian and economic consequences of nuclear exchange over every regional conflict. Once someone breaks this pact and starts using weapons freely, the deterrence value of nuclear weapons essentially disappears, and we live in a world where not only can nations be destroyed in a few hours or less, but the “threshold of pain” of destructiveness in a peacetime context drops, and the notion of killing or displacing millions of people becomes an acceptible and routine consequence of conflict. This is not a world we want to live in.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t respond to North Korean actions, but using or even baldly threatening the use of nuclear weapons is not a smart or rational way to go about it, particularly at risking or even directly causing the deaths or displacement of millions of people. China should be made to understand through diplomatic and economic efforts that continued protection of North Korea is not in its long term best interest, and that provocative military action by North Korea would result in a scenario that would be to no ones’ satisfaction. Just saying “Fuck it,” and charging over the top in the hopes that somehow it will all work out would be like driving tanks into East Germany under the cover of Corporal tactical nuclear missiles and daring Khrushchev and Kosygin to do something about it.
Stranger
LSLGuy:
I totally agree with that, but I’m talking about seeing a North Korea with ICBM capability and anticipating that such might happen, and have a long-term strategy to protect South Koreans when it comes to that. You sure as heck can’t do it quickly enough if the North has already started up, or do it quickly and keep a likely pre-emptive strike secret if and when the “absolute need” for it arises.