One of the costs of committing so many troops to Iraq and Afghanistan is that we don’t have the resources to effectively deal with other potential emergencies, like this:
North Korea threatened a military response to South Korean participation in a U.S.-led program to seize weapons of mass destruction, and said it will no longer abide by the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War.
“The Korean People’s Army will not be bound to the Armistice Agreement any longer,” the official Korean Central News Agency said in a statement today. Any attempt to inspect North Korean vessels will be countered with “prompt and strong military strikes.” South Korea’s military said it will “deal sternly with any provocation” from the North.
Pulling out of the 1953 armistice is a fairly dramatic gesture, and it’s definitely threatening. The defense of South Korea is complicated by Seoul’s proximity to the border with North Korea.
When the U.S. military tries to explain the difficulty of using force to stop North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, the oddly poetic phrase it turns to is the “tyranny of proximity.”
The phrase, which has been in the lexicon of the U.S. forces in South Korea for years, stems from the imposing array of conventional artillery that the North Koreans have dug into the hills just north of the demilitarized zone, a mere 30 miles from this capital city of 12 million. The nightmare scenario is that if the United States opts for a more forceful approach to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, the communist regime would retaliate not only against the 38,000 American troops stationed in South Korea, but also against South Korea itself…
…Estimates of the damage that could be inflicted by a North Korean attack range from bad to apocalyptic. Lee Yang Ho, defense minister during a similar nuclear crisis in 1994, said one computer simulation conducted during his term projected 1 million dead, including thousands of Americans.
“It is assumed that if the United States were to strike North Korea that the North Koreans would fight back,” Lee said. “All industry would be destroyed, gas stations, power plants. This is such a densely populated area that even if North Korean artillery were not very accurate, anyplace you would hit there would be huge numbers of casualties.”
U.S. military experts who have contemplated strikes on North Korea agree.
The current disagreement is caused by South Korea’s decision to join in international efforts to prevent North Korea from importing or exporting nuclear technology. Given North Korea’s desperate need for revenue of any type and their aggressive nuclear weapons program (they detonated a nuclear bomb last week), there is no country on Earth more likely to sell nuclear material to a terrorist organization (knowingly or unknowingly). Because Seoul cannot be protected from attack, we cannot take any military action against North Korea unless we are willing to see hundreds of thousands killed on our side alone.
If war broke out not from our choosing, but from some irrational act of the extremely paranoid and potentially unstable North Korean government, we would be woefully undermanned. And it is not unthinkable that any such conflict could go nuclear. The problem of North Korean behavior is not one of our making, but our unpreparedness is a direct result of the decision to wage the War on Terror as a war of invasion and occupation of foreign lands. We cannot wind down Iraq fast enough, and our surge in Afghanistan needs to be carefully evaluated with the threat of North Korea in mind.
