N. Korea attack on South would be lethal

SEOUL — The Korean peninsula is a well-worn chessboard scarred by a half-century of war and tension.

But this time, analysts warn, the end game could be new and deadly.

“This is hair-trigger stuff,” said longtime Korea observer and expert Don Oberdorfer, author of “The Two Koreas.” “I don’t like it.”

Oberdorfer said he’s troubled by recent messages released by the Korean Central News Agency, North Korea’s propaganda outlet. Some were attributed to foreign ministry spokesmen or said “the KNCA is authorized to state…”

“Those aren’t typical propaganda statements,” Oberdorfer said to Stars and Stripes. “Those come from the highest levels in North Korea” and are intended to send serious messages “to … our government and other governments.”

Among the messages, he said, North Korea “would not stand by for the threat of pre-emptive action against their facilities.”

If a conflict did escalate, most analysts agreed, North Korea almost certainly would lose to the better-armed, better-equipped and better-trained U.S. forces — but not before it wreaked havoc.

U.S. Forces Korea and others estimate massive casualties in and around Seoul — up to 1 million in the first 24 hours alone — even calling South Korea’s capital “the kill box.”

More than 21 million civilians are in the Seoul metropolitan area. At about 50 miles from the Demilitarized Zone, they’re well within North Korean artillery range.

North Korea has a vast arsenal of chemical and other mass-killer weapons, report Korea analysts, including Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“Even 24 hours of war on the Korean peninsula would be tremendously costly in civilian deaths,” said Donald P. Gregg, former CIA station chief in South Korea from 1973-75 and U.S. ambassador to Seoul from 1989-93, in an interview with Stripes.

‘Just be a hellacious environment’

“We believe that the North Koreans will open an attack with a large artillery barrage — massive artillery to try to penetrate our defenses,” Brig. Gen. John DeFreitas, USFK senior intelligence officer, told Stripes.

Within the first hours of an attack, an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 artillery rounds could rain down on Seoul, Stephen Oertwig, a USFK spokesman, told Stripes.

Roughly 70 percent of the North’s ground forces are positioned near the DMZ, USFK has estimated.

It’s believed the North has more than 13,000 cannons, rocket launchers and other artillery systems. More than 4,000 are ranged along the DMZ, many nestled inside hardened underground shelters like reinforced bunkers and tunnel networks, making it “nearly impossible” for U.S.-South Korean forces to hit them, according to unclassified USFK documents.

Others are on mobile launchers and more able to elude counter-fire.

Initial hours and days of a North Korean attack on the South “would just be a hellacious environment,” said Peter Brookes, former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Affairs, now the Heritage Foundation’s Asian studies director, in an interview with Stripes.

North Korea probably would bomb apartment complexes and other civilian targets only “in an act of desperation,” DeFreitas said. But as its ground forces invaded, “It would be very difficult for North Korea to maneuver south without killing a large number of noncombatants,” given “the urban sprawl of the Seoul area.”

Korea’s geography dictates that the heaviest ground fighting would unfold in the west along a 75-mile tract from the Imjin River to the Chorwon Valley. The peninsula’s eastern part is mountainous, making it tough for the North’s tanks and other vehicles to maneuver east of the Chorwon Valley.

North Korea maintains the world’s third-largest ground force, with 1.2 million troops on active duty and another 5 million or more in reserve forces, according to unclassified USFK documents.

That includes a special operations force of more than 100,000. They’re believed to be elite, well-trained, disciplined, highly motivated and, despite the North’s food shortages and other problems, in good physical condition and morale, DeFreitas said.

“Their strategy would probably be to paralyze the rear areas of South Korea as much as they can, and they’ll be able to attack without warning,” said Richard Bush, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of its Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, in an interview with Stripes.

In comparison, as of mid-2002, South Korea had 683,000 active-duty servicemembers and 4.5 million reservists, USFK said. Nearly 38,000 U.S. troops are stationed on the peninsula. And Pacific Command reportedly has asked for 2,000 additional troops, long-range bombers and other assets in support of the peninsula.

But even if everything arrived in the Pacific this week, unclassified Army and CIA reports given to Congress show that the sheer weight of troops and weapons overwhelmingly would favor North Korea.

The North’s conventional war machine also includes massive artillery, a large missile arsenal able to hit any part of South Korea and reach Japan and beyond, more than 3,000 tanks and a submarine force of about 100, mostly midget vessels designed to mine South Korean ports and land special ops troops for commando raids, USFK has said.

‘Bombed into the Stone Age’

If North Korea invaded, officials said, the U.S. and South Korea immediately would unleash artillery counter-battery fire and launch missiles — all aimed at stopping the North’s drive above Seoul.

U.S. Air Force fighters and other aircraft would launch from Osan and Kunsan air bases in South Korea, mainland Japan and Okinawa, also emerging from the USS Kitty Hawk or other carriers in the region. South Korean aircraft would scramble from airfields around the peninsula.

“If they want to attack and kill American GIs by significant numbers, that would mean the end of their regime … they could be bombed into the Stone Age,” said Fei Ling Wang, associate professor of international affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology, in an interview with Stripes. Wang also taught international relations and East Asia politics at West Point from 1992-93.

If a North Korean first strike were to knock out U.S. and South Korean aircraft with missiles or artillery, carrier-based aircraft could be crucial in the early stages.

But it’s not going to be easy, warned another analyst.

“Sure, you can get through those barriers, but it takes time,” said Daniel Pinkston, adjunct professor of comparative national security policy at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., and senior research associate at its Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

“Even though people say, ‘In the end, the North Koreans would lose’ … in the end, the cost would be extremely high — impossibly high,” said Thomas Robinson, former professor of national security at Georgetown University and now president of American Asian Research Enterprises in McLean, Va., in an interview with Stripes.

Robinson summarizes the American strategy as “tripwire and escalation.”

U.S. troops’ tripwire role would be “to stand in the way of a North Korean invasion, to stand in the way enough to slow down the North Koreans” while other forces reach Korea — “and we’re talking about logistics and supply,” Robinson said.

“It takes a hell of a long time in terms of the initial very high level of destruction and war-fighting,” he said. “It takes a long time for those people — 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. That’s the big worry: that the 2nd Division would be called upon to do too many things.”

But those initial countermeasures are only part of the U.S.-South Korean response plan.

South Korea would mobilize almost 3 million personnel for military service. The United States would swell its force in South Korea to almost 700,000, including more than 120,000 Reserve and National Guard troops, according to unclassified USFK documents.

Several analysts say much of the North’s military hardware is of 1960s Soviet-era vintage, in questionable condition.

“Their equipment is degrading,” Gregg told Stripes.

“We don’t see any hard numbers as to how long” North Korea could fight a battle, DeFreitas said to Stripes, “but clearly, we believe less than 90 days.”

North Korea’s air force is also aging. Some planes, such as the MiG-15 fighter, date back five decades to the Korean War, according to USFK documents. USFK analysts have predicted that U.S. and South Korean forces would be able to obtain air superiority over the North’s tactical fighter jet fleet.

The wild cards

But all such projections are based on one assumption most analysts acknowledge may rest on quicksand: That a wartime North Korea would confine itself to conventional weapons.

Brookes warned of “the high potential for a chemical weapons environment.”

The North harbors the world’s third-largest stockpile of chemical weapons, which intelligence assessments put at about 5,000 metric tons of agents at its disposal, according to USFK. It’s also believed to have anthrax, sarin and nerve agents, USFK reports.

“Unclassified U.S. intelligence reports,” Cordesman wrote in a Dec. 30, 2002, article for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “state that North Korea has also mass-produced chemical weapons, including persistent nerve gases, since the 1980s.

“It is believed to have thousands of bombs, artillery shells, and multiple rocket launcher warheads that are chemically armed.”

Several analysts suggest that North Korea’s knowledge of the likely outcome of armed conflict might be the chief, and most effective, deterrent.

“I would tell you,” said Retired Army Gen. John H. Tilleli Jr., commander of U.S. Forces Korea from July 1996 to December 1999, “as someone who served there for a long period as the CINC, that I am very hopeful that we will never come to a conflict on the peninsula because … I believe that conflict and crisis is probably the last thing that anyone who serves there wants.”

— T.D. Flack and Jeremy Kirk contributed to this report.