Yes, spark240, I’m aware of that. I’m just curious as to why they would willingly live in a place that was likely to be on the front lines of World War III.
Anyway, after watching that Liberia video in the Godforsaken Hellhole thread in IMHO, I watched Vice’s North Korea videos. Yikes. What a bizarre society.
After watching that, I have to wonder: does North Korea actually have some kind of viable strategic plan in the event of a war? They seem to be built more towards deterrence than anything, but I wonder if they have an actual plan that, if successfully executed, would result in victory. I’m sure a big part of their plan would involve sneaking special forces into South Korea to wreak havoc, but that alone won’t get them too far past the DMZ. How would they react if they began their grand offensive, only to have their divisions obliterated by American/ROK airpower before they even took 2 steps over the border? I don’t see the average North Korean soldier displaying a whole lot of initiative.
That may be conservative. It’s hard to tell. You’re projecting that all of those guns are the roughly equal of a gun that has to worry about being mobile, set up quickly, etc. which imposes weight restrictions, lack of cooling systems reducing the sustained firing rate, etc.
I don’t know what the NK artillery order of battle is, so that may be a roughly correct guess. But they have had time to build whatever guns and place whatever guns they wish, so they may have significantly more heavy artillery (with a significantly higher TNT weight), cooling systems to boost the firing rate, stockpiled ammo, and so on. One problem is that medium mobile artillery like that typically only has a range of 15 or so miles, which is too short. Guns with greater range can be built, but more of the shell weight has to go to reinforcing the structure of the shell to withstand higher acceleration and velocities, which leaves less room for payload.
So, I’d have to do more research to say, but I think your estimates are probably on the conservative side. I wanted to mention too that a lot of small explosives generally do more damage for the same total of TNT than one big explosive - explosive pressure, or at least the overpressure wave, trails off with the cube of the distance from the explosion. Which is a big part of the reason we developed ICBMs with several 150-250KT warheads instead of one 2MT+ warheads - it’s better to spread your destructive power around. So, excepting special properties of nuclear weapons like EMP and radiation, 250KT of TNT from thousands of different sources is going to cause more damage than one 250KT nuke.
I heard the same about the area just east of the western East German border, since they’d moved everyone away from it and left about a 10 km-wide buffer zone. I have no idea if it was preserved after reunification but I would hope that most of it was.
Fulda is 60,000 people not really a big town. That’s slightly different to 10 million people including the entire government living and working within artillery range of a hostile state with which they are still at war.
Didn’t anyone in 1953 go “hey moving our capital to the south might be a good idea?”
Yes, indeed, but I suspect that postwar suburban sprawl from Seoul would swallow up quite a bit of it. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman has a good chapter on the DMZ’s ecological vibrancy. There’s even a unique species of bird there, IIRC.
They may be seeing their own strengths, & none of their own weaknesses. And S. Korea’s weaknesses, et cetera.
In case anyone is interested there is a dated but relevant fictional book about the Korean War restarting: Larry Bond’s Red Phoenix.
The NK order of battle as I recall:
Lots and lots of commando attacks
Sneak attacks by submarines (hmmm)
Seoul is largely ignored
The NK forces head south as fast as their logistical tail will allow. At which point the SK/US forces blow the logistical tail off.
Russia gets involved directly (it’s a Cold War era book) but China refuses to get involved so the war ends with an Allied victory.
Now this was written quite a while ago (IIRC it was Bond’s first solo book after he wrote Red Storm Rising with Tom Clancy and got very little credit for it) so there’s no stealth bombers, drones, GPS, et cetera. However, a battleship chews up the NK shore pretty good.
In my non-expert opinion here’s how I see Korean War 2010 panning out:
Initial NK commando attacks are effective, if NK maintains the element of surprise.
NK artillery pounds ass all day long the first day of the war. After that, they learn what laser-guided counterbattery fire is all about.
SK/US air power runs out of bombs long before it runs out of targets in NK.
NK air power just folds. I predict they make zero kills and they’re lucky if they can get aircraft off the ground after a week.
NK tank power gets a vicious pounding from aircraft, man-portable missiles and main battle tanks that can shoot targets from a mile away.
NK nuclear assets are attacked vigorously by fighter-bombers and commandos. If Kim Jong-Il has a prescient bout of paranoia and moves his nukes, it will only be to protect them and not to use them. Because if he does… somewhere in SK there’s got to be a hardened bunker guarded by Marines with some “special delivery” just waiting to be attached to a fighter-bomber.
FWIW I don’t think China would get involved militarily. They might send some APCs to the border to “discourage” a mass exodus of NK refugees. Other than that, I think they just have too much to lose by jumping in on the NK side.
Pentagon denies it’s moving a carrier into the region: Pentagon denies aircraft carrier being deployed to Korean Peninsula - CNN.com
Good thread, just came in to emphasize something: while most every civilian op-ed piece talks about the threat, no one in military circles really talks of North Korea targeting Seoul with all of its artillery. Perhaps a terror tactic, or a peacetime threat, but if war actually broke out, the North would have its own set of military targets to use its military against.
Destroying Seoul would in all likelihood be counterproductive-- not only a waste of resources, but if the North broke through (i.e., if they won), they’d have a ruined city. Far better to encircle it, avoid it, and capture it intact.
That said, there’s no chance they can do that in 2010 against the ROK forces (augmented with American airpower).
Either the Penninsula is way calmer than I think it is, or we are sending a carrier, & the situation is on the brink of war.
Bad news.
Attacking Seoul would mess up a major route of logistics for the SKs as well as creating a mass exodus of refugees that the SKs would have to cope with. Leave Seoul alone and SK can focus all its efforts on killing NKs.
Yeah, if the NKs are crazy enough to start a war, I don’t think they’ll be thinking ahead as to how to create Pyongyang South in place of the former Seoul. It’s the SK capital, a military center and a regional economic hub; I’m afraid it’ll get pounded, just as it did in Korean War 1.0.
One can’t help but admire the way KJI has been able to play such a weak hand so strongly, and thumb his nose at all the imperial might of the USA.
NK has the USA in a very awkward spot.
pdts
On the contrary, I can help but admire him.
Taking up your tone of pedantry…
I didn’t say one couldn’t help but admire him.
I said one couldn’t help but admire the way he has pulled something off.
He has shown an immense amount of strategic nous, stringing along the imperial forces of the USA, not to mention Europe, Russia, China, South Korea and Japan along for at least 20 years now… all the while avoiding internal dissent and remaining in unchallenged power at home.
Pretty impressive stuff.
pdts
Whatever you say…COMRADE.
Oooo, look, it’s put down the sabre - look carefully, and you’ll spot him in the seventeenth row, third from the end: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnZBgiZ3d8s
I have no doubt that they’ll hit Seoul, and refugees would become a problem from day one.
That’s a far cry from the apocalyptic “every North Korean artillery tube is aimed at and will fire on Seoul within 30 minutes reducing it to fine rubble” meme that is popular in the media.
Maybe the Norks are that stupid. But I don’t think they’re stupid. Just crazy :).
America looks weak right now (deceptive).
[ol]
[li]Iraq[/li][li]Afganistan[/li][li]Threats from Iran[/li][li]Venezuala rattling its sabre (clownishly).[/li][li]Alienated Allies[/li][li]Economic woes[/li][li]Angry citizens[/li][li]Oil spill[/li][li]Katrina damage leftovers.[/li][/ol]
And Kim is in trouble, have no doubts.
The only question is, is he self-deluding enough to put it all on one roll of the dice?