Let’s say that North Korea tests a nuke this weekend and the US retaliates by launching ship or sub-based non-nuclear missiles and takes out the known nuclear sites in North Korea. NK interprets this as the pretense to a larger attack leading to regime change and orders its artillery to shell Seoul and its army to cross the DMZ in a full blown attack. Let’s also assume that China doesn’t come to the aid of North Korea, at least not right away.
Assuming that the US doesn’t use tactical nukes in the defense of SK, and given the sheer numbers involved, would the entrenched South Koreans, with joint US-SK air support, be able to styme the NK attack or would they be quickly overwhelmed?
If the NK army can get past the SK line of defense is there anything to stop them from reaching Seoul, again given the number of soldiers involved in the attack?
Does anyone believe that the NK army would not attack if ordered to do so, or that NK’s armed forces are a paper tiger?
The premise is inherently flawed, in my opinion. North Korea has tested nukes before without the US retaliating. Precisely because it would lead to World War III.
True, but not on Trump’s watch, and he is backing up his threats with military assets. If Trump wants to show Pyongyang who’s boss this gives him the opening to do so. So while the premise may not be likely, assuming that cooler heads prevail, it’s certainly not out of the question IMHO.
I have no reason to believe that the North Korean Army would be any more effective against us then the Iraqi Army. Remember that during the war it was only the Chinese and Russian entry into the war that caused the war to end without a complete NK annihilation. Right now President Trump has done a fairly good reframing of the conflict in order to create a separation between NK and China.
It’s well documented that NK cannot feed its people. While the army is very large, the soldiers are malnourished and the supply line would, in all likelihood, quickly crumble. A good book that addresses this is “Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea”, by Barbara Demick.
South Korea would suffer big league – if we were going to strike NK, I’m sure we’d try to get every piece of artillery and launcher aimed at Seoul at the same time we took out the nukes, but there’s probably thousands of sites, many hardened, and we wouldn’t get them all. And immediately after, NK would launch everything they had left at Seoul, and probably kill tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions.
I’m sure they have some plan for delivering and detonating a nuclear device in or near Seoul. Whether the NK military, if so ordered, would actually carry out such an order rather than initiate a regime change inside Kim’s skull, is a good question (but I expect they would go ahead and attempt to nuke Seoul). After deciding that, then the question of whether they would be successful in a nuclear weapon’s delivery and detonation near Seoul in the face of active armed defense is also a big if.
If they don’t have a design small enough to fit on a missile yet, they could try to fly it in on a suicide mission crewed by future vapor eager to give their lives for the… which one are we on now? Great Leader? Dear Leader? His Most Voluminous Leader? Bestest Leader?
They just need to get close to the Seoul metropolitan area to have a detonation kill hundreds of thousands in an instant and millions over the next few weeks.
I thought Trump said he’d passed off all his military decisions to the Joint Chiefs. Surely they wouldn’t be dopey enough to start a war with China by bombing North Korea?
Off topic, but I wonder if, with all of the stealth technology, the U.S could have conducted a flyover during the big parade today in Pyongyang, just to help “celebrate.” No attack, just a big loss of face for Kim.
Too risky, I suppose, for just a “demonstration,” and the loss of face for the U.S. and boost to NK morale if they did manage to down a U.S. aircraft over NK would be considerable.
That MOAB dropped on Afghanistan was a thermobaric device - it sucks up the air for several 100 yds, AIUI.
Load up a dozen B-52’s (why use modern bombers when the adversary can’t handle a 60 year old bomber?) with them and sprinkle them over the north’s artillery emplacements. And the DMZ.
Both the North and the South have invasion tunnels under the DMZ - a lovely place to try out the new, improved, bunker-buster. Just be sure to tell the South not to use their tunnels until day after tomorrow.
Once the artillery (or at least the crews - people near a thermobaric detonation tend to get turned inside-out) is destroyed, it’s open season on the nuke and missile sites.
Well, yeah, it’s more of a Hollywood movie stunt than an actual action that would be legitimately considered.
I was just kind of idly wondering if it was something that the U.S. could pull off, if they wanted to, in terms of being able to penetrate all of the way to Pyongyang without alerting the NK military until doing a high-speed, low-altitude pass along the parade route.
But if they did consider doing something like that (in the context of all of the saber rattling going on this weekend), I don’t think they would reject it out of consideration of not wanting to violate NK’s air space. We violate other countries’ airspace without a formal state of hostitilities when it suits us and the other country has little prospect of being able to do anything about it. Pakistan (ostensibly an ally but none to happy about the bin Laden raid), Syria (I’m going to count launching missiles at you as violating your air space), Libya, Chad (or was it Sudan?), the old U-2 spy flights…
But I know the military doesn’t put men and equipment at risk just for the sake of tweaking someone’s nose.
No way the US and South Korea lose to North Korea conventionally; they’d probably win in about 99% of scenarios. But it all comes down to how badly Seoul is damaged through it all. Proportionally it depends on whether South Korea comes out of the war having suffered the equivalent of five 9/11s or fifty 9/11s.
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Load up a dozen B-52’s (why use modern bombers when the adversary can’t handle a 60 year old bomber?) with them and sprinkle them over the north’s artillery emplacements. And the DMZ.
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Well, the problem with this idea is that it woould not work at all.
first of all, the MOAB isn’t designed to be carried in or dropped from a B-52, so you have a small problem there.
Secondly, the USAF probably doesn’t have that many of them.
Thirdly, it’s a big bomb and I know people seem to get huge erections about it, but, small though it might appear on a map, Korea is a big place. If you dropped 100 MOABs you still would not be anywhere close to destroying all, or even a large number of, NK’s artillery assets. They don’t park them all conveniently in one place.
Don’t forget that the US can knock out artillery shells in mid air so even if they can’t preemptively take out every artillery site it doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be a lot of damage to the south.