That has been the basis of nuclear arms strategy for the last 60+ years. Nuclear arms only have a deterrent effect if the opponent believes you can and will use them. If NK uses nukes and there is no nuclear response, it creates the precedent that a state can use nukes without fear of retaliation. This undermines the entire premise of nuclear deterrence.
Hypotheticals are better suited to IMHO rather than General Questions. Moved.
samclem, moderator
It doesn’t matter if there is a major attack or not by the North Koreans; use of a nuke means that government ends and the country is occupied–Full Stop.
The difference between now and the 1950’s is that the PRC is a full partner in the global economy and has (albeit at times prickly) relations with the rest of the world. In other words, we are talking to them, not at them.
So in the case of a nuclear bomb devasting Seoul, I suspect (as others have mentioned) that the President will get on the line to the PRC leadership and say something like: “N. Korea did this and that state will be destroyed. We are aware of your concerns in that region and we want to consult/work with you on an amenable relationship, but only in the context of the complete dissolution of N. Korea and it’s eventual melding into a reunited Korean nation.”
And I think the Chinese will take that deal, as long as they are part of the solution.
As for using nukes, I cannot see it, unless there is a definitive target (their nuclear weapons processing plants?), it can be done without fallout/radiation affecting any other nation, and is done with coordination with all possibly affected nations.
And I hope to hell it never comes to that decision. But I fear that one day it might.
Are you sure? Last time I checked, drug lords and Al-Qaeda were not governments.
You appear to have missed the last 15 years of current events.
The MAD doctrine was developed when only superpowers had nukes, with inventories in the tens of thousands. Rogue nations like the DPRK are a relatively new threat; expecting them to show the same rational response to the threat of annihilation is probably not a good idea anyway. I doubt China or Russia would change their view of the wisdom of a nuclear attack on the US.
South Korea isn’t going to wait for the UN or China, and they aren’t going to wait for the US either. NK sets off a nuke, SK responds instantly with everything they have left. And I can’t imagine that Obama is dumb enough to tell US forces in the area to sit tight and help with the invasion.
Obviously it isn’t going to happen, not least because a nuke isn’t something NK would use just because. Either they think they can conquer SK, which they can’t, or they want to say “leave us alone or we will nuke you again”, which nobody in the peninsula is going to wait long enough to hear. If Kim just wants to go out in a blaze of glory, well, he and his kind will go out but not with much of a blaze. They just get bombed into smithereens in a few hours by US and SK aircraft, using conventional weapons, and then we have the worst refugee crisis in human history, followed by the collapse of the Korean economies. This is bad on the SK part, but not much different in NK than it is now.
Major hit to the Chinese economy as well, and they won’t be likely to take on the task of trying to deal with the refugees. The UN will do OK in the short term, and the US and EU will have to do the heavy lifting of rebuilding Seoul and dealing with dragging the North into the twentieth century. (No, that is not a typo).
It would be like Hitler in the bunker. I can’t believe the generals would actually believe in the personality cult of Kim to the point where they would commit suicide just because he wanted to do so. Plus after the US and SK kills the NK command-and-control, Kim and his generals wouldn’t be able to tell their army to die heroically to the last man. So they would surrender en masse, especially after a few days of being bombed into kimchi with zero ability to do anything at all about it.
Regards,
Shodan
Considering that South and North Korea combined are about the size of Kansas, it would be like Dodge City nuking Topeka. No need for full on nuclear escalation. Considering the weather patterns would likely result in the initial fallout drifting north and contaminating the North already, China would probably save us the trouble and take out Kim on their own.
We would not retaliate with nukes. Period, full stop.
However, I would be rather surprised if we didn’t throw a salvo of cruise missiles at their top targets, including the Kim estate.
On top of whatever South Korea decided to do, which would probably be full scale war. After all, look how angry/insane/vengeful the US got after 9/11. You think nuking a SK target is going to draw less of a response from them?
The Chinese would immediately object, and obstruct anything through the UN, calling once again for “restraint”. I’m pretty sure our joint response would be “Go fuck yourselves”.
I’d just like to point out, when it comes to “fallout” from a using a nuke, the fallout just ain’t that bad.
It sure ain’t healthy, but it ain’t cancer and death city either.
Hundreds of open air tests occurred worldwide, and often some pretty damn big and nastier ones for that matter.
Bolding mine.
Overall a good post I agree with … except for the bolded part. That’s where your Prez utterly loses the Chinese.
The complete dissolution of the NK government is fine w everybody including China. But Chinese hawks are not going to happily let the rump be absorbed into SK any more than we’d be happy seeing SK slowly turn totalitarian then want join NK. And no matter how you slice it, “unified Korea” is a euphemism for “SK absorbs NK”.
So NK survives as a separate state occupied along the lines of Germany after WWII. Multiple occupying powers, and probably China having the lion’s share of land and influence.
And, just as post-WWII Germany, the assumption is that this new situation will be the *status quo *UFN. As with Germany, it may take another 50 years and significant changes in the occupying powers’ governments before the new *status quo *becomes updateable. Had somebody other than Gorbachev won the Soviet leadership tussle post-Androov, we might well still have a Soviet Union and an East Germany today.
It’ll easily be 100 years from now before the last vestiges of Kim’s mess is paved over by progress.
Going back to the OP.
From a strictly military perspective there are plans and plans. Lots of pre-selected targets and all the rest. If for whatever reason the NCA wanted to respond w nukes, the limiting factor is their time to decide that’s what they want and to look up in the Big Book whether they want NK attack plan 1, 2, or 27. Then the orders flow out and the work gets done.
There’s less assets on hair-trigger alert than back in the glory days of SAC and Lemay. But the stuff we do have is a lot more dynamically targetable. And IMO there’s plenty enough for an inherently small target set like NK.
As so many others have said, this isn’t the way any sane senior DoD or NCA would decide to go. But if they did, it wouldn’t take long to implement.
I agree. There would be a series of non-nuclear missile strikes at military and command targets in North Korea.
But no nuclear attack. Why nuke Pyongyang when we expect to occupy it within a few weeks? Nuclear weapons are used when you can’t make a conventional attack.
I’m going with “Never (probably).” I’m thinking that the president (from either party) and the Pentagon would only accept the use of nukes to defend US territory. As long as the attacks were confined to South Korea, and NK wasn’t trying to lob missles in our direction, then I think the Pentagon would keep our nukes in the launch tubes, and do its best with conventional arms.
China would never admit that they approved of a North Korean attack. They’d just make sure that their UN ambassador vetoed any proposed actions, citing some bullshit concern about retaliatory attacks harming the North Korean population.
Isn’t the whole concept of a “nuclear umbrella” that an enemy nuclear attack on a US ally will be regarded as the same as an enemy attack on the US itself?
The thing you’re missing is the “command and control” bit about the military in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. The US is in charge of actual combat operations. The idea is to move that over to the South Korean military as soon as practical, but it hasn’t happened yet–unless I missed out on that news bite.
I do believe you hit the nail on the head there. I’ll add that nuking Seoul (actually Seoul Capital Area) will take out about one half of South Korea’s population.
China’s part of the reason why it’s so hard to become a refugee from North Korea: the Chinese government catches those it can and then sends them back to North Korea. The reason is that China doesn’t want refugees from North Korea. And that’s with the trickle of people coming across now; imagine the PRC government’s reaction to a massive influx.
The UNC is well-equipped, well-trained, and technologically capable to carry out a war that North Korea could not win today. Oh, the DPRK military is definitely in the 20th Century already; it’s just in the wrong end of it.
The general and flag officers obviously do not believe their own propaganda. If they did, they would already be trying to invade South Korea. So, yep, they won’t be going along with something that would negate the regime up north.
It’s not heroism that would be the reason for the DPRK military to fight until they’re all dead. I’d venture that it’s the awareness on the part of the leadership that (a) they won’t win the war, and (b) right after losing said war, they’ll be put on trial for crimes against humanity.
In short: starting an actual sustained fighting war against the South is not in the North’s interest at all.
What is with all this talk about China not being able to absorb North Korean refugees? China has a population over 1.3 billion. Even if entirely *one-fourth *of North Korea’s populace fled over the Yalu River - that’s about 6 million people - that would be less than 0.5 percent of China’s existing population. It would be akin to Germany taking in 400,000 migrants, no?
In other words, perfectly absorbable.
It depends on how powerful the nuke. If it’s the 10-kiloton variety, plenty of people in the Seoul area would survive. Not in good condition, but they’d live.
Not unless they’ve managed to make a bomb about 1,000 times more powerful than they’ve so far demonstrated.
Shows the net effects of a 10kt bomb dropped on Seoul.
Fat boy might think one of them enough to destroy the entire USA, but he’s delusional.
Something that occurred to me, I wonder if all the concern over NK getting long-range missles is misguided. Seoul is damn-near right across the border from NK. So are the South Korean/US military bases near the DMZ. They could literally get a nuke to any of these places with artillery. In fact, from the North’s perspective, that might even be a superior strategy to trying to be huge-ass nukes that need to be launced on missles. Instead, they could build a large number of low-yield nuclear shells, and use artillery to drop them on multiple points across Seoul and on the forward bases.