Washington: US military power may be of little use for President Barack Obama in confronting a defiant North Korea, as any strike carries the risk of horrific casualties while the regime’s nuclear weapons would likely remain hidden from view.
There are no attractive military options for the United States when it comes to North Korea, experts say, because Pyongyang has massive firepower trained on its neighbor and because the regime can easily conceal its nuclear weapons as well as other elements of its program.
With an army of more than a million troops and a vast arsenal of artillery and missiles pointed at South Korea as well as Japan, North Korea could exact untold bloodshed for a preemptive strike against its nuclear weapons sites.
Casualties would number in the hundreds of thousands, possibly within the first days of a war, experts say.
“If there were to be a full-scale war, the casualties would be unimaginable,” said Chaibong Hahm, senior political scientist at the California-based RAND Corporation.
“Ultimately there’s absolutely no doubt in anybody’s mind the combined US and South Korean forces would prevail. But at what cost is a serious question,” he told AFP.
A war game conducted by former senior US officials in 2005 for The Atlantic magazine had a conservative estimate of 100,000 casualties, assuming American air power could take out missiles and artillery at the outset at a rate of 4,000 sorties a day.
Former US president Bill Clinton seriously considered a preemptive strike against North Korea’s reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, ex-officials have since revealed. But a diplomatic breakthrough by another former American president, Jimmy Carter, defused the crisis.
Since then, North Korea’s nuclear program has progressed under a veil of secrecy, making a preemptive attack much more difficult. The outside world can only guess where Pyongyang’s weapons or suspected uranium enrichment sites are hidden, analysts say.
US aircraft probably would be able to disable plutonium production and reprocessing facilities with precision raids, but atomic bombs could be hidden in the regime’s network of caves and tunnels.
“We don’t know where the existing nuclear weapons are,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
A failed preemptive strike could lead to nightmare scenarios ranging from North Korea detonating nuclear weapons or launching chemical or biological assaults.
During annual exercises with South Korea this year, US special forces conducted a mock operation against a fictional “chemical weapons lab” while medical teams practiced treating casualties from a chemical attack.
The United States has reduced its force in South Korea but still has 28,500 troops there, along with tens of thousands in Japan, and missile defense weaponry on land and at sea designed to intercept North Korean missile attacks.
But with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington would be hard pressed to come up with the large-scale force some military planners say would be necessary in the event of a full-blown conflict with North Korea.
Instead of bombing raids against nuclear targets, another option would be a strict naval blockade to seal off North Korean ports and possibly break the back of the regime.
US and South Korean naval power would easily defeat Pyongyang’s ships and submarines, but such a move would carry the same risk of massive retaliation on land and a slide into all-out war, analysts say.
The dismal scenarios do not end with appalling casualties or nuclear warfare.
The possible fall of the North Korean regime in any war would trigger new dangers, with weapons of mass destruction up for grabs and a stream of impoverished humanity fleeing south.
Author Robert Kaplan wrote on The Atlantic magazine’s website that “anyone who talks breezily about ‘helping’ North Korea to collapse has simply not learned the lesson of Iraq: The only thing worse than a totalitarian state is no state at all.”
