President Clinton is pushing for international economic sanctions an effort to stop North Korea from building nuclear weapons. The isolated Communist regime in Pyongyang is defying the United States and the United Nations and warning that it considers sanctions an act of war. If either side pushes the other too far, the second Korean war will be even worse than the first. by Joseph L. Galloway, Bruce B. Auster 

        In the wee hours of a rainy Sunday in June 1950, the advance guard of Kim Il Sung's Inmungun, or People's Army, slipped across the 38th parallel and launched a war that lasted three years, involved 20 nations and killed or wounded some 4 million people, most of them civilians. The North Korean capital of Pyongyang changed hands twice; the southern capital of Seoul changed hands four times. Both halves of the Korean peninsula were devastated, and reconstruction, always with one eye over the shoulder, took the industrious South Koreans the better part of three decades.   

        All that is needed to start a second Korean war is a signal from North Korea's 82-year-old Kim, who remains his country's unchallenged "Great Leader." It would be suicide for North Korea, a nation of 23 million people with no friends, few customers, industrial plants that operate only 15 to 20 percent of the time because of power shortages and an economy that has shrunk by an average 4.1 percent a year since 1990. It would be a catastrophe for prosperous, capitalist, democratic South Korea, whose 45 million citizens could see the good life they have built with such hard work blown away. And it would be a bloodbath for the millions of Korean and American soldiers who would fight it.   

        But wars are born more often of miscalculation than of calculation. The jockeying between the United States and North Korea over Pyongyang's suspected nuclear weapons program is escalating. The danger of a fatal blunder, the enormous arsenals on both sides of the demilitarized zone that divides the Koreas and the possibility that a desperate North might use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons combine to make the Korean peninsula the most dangerous place on Earth.   

        Last week, South Korean Defense Minister Rhee Byoung Tae told the National Assembly in Seoul that North Korean war readiness, measured by the pace of maneuvers, is the highest since 1990, and the government ordered inspections of the South's 223,000 underground shelters and 60,000 emergency water supplies. Pyongyang, meanwhile, directly threatened Japan, saying Tokyo cannot avoid punishment if it supports economic sanctions against the North. As President Clinton scrambled to prevent the crisis from becoming a meltdown, former President Jimmy Carter accepted an invitation from Pyongyang to come try to end the standoff. "I think in the weeks ahead [the North Koreans] are going to [have] some serious discussions about how they want to relate to the rest of the world," Clinton told U.S. News last week. But Japan and China are resisting sanctions on North Korea, and Pyongyang, having seen Washington back down in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti, may be tempted to continue hanging tough.   

        The Korean peninsula today "is as alarming and dangerous" as it has been anytime in the past 30 years, says Steve Bradener, political adviser to the American commander in chief of the United Nations Command. "The worry is that for a lot of years the North Koreans have put 25 percent of their GNP into building and maintaining a huge conventional army," Bradener says. "The danger is that they may begin to feel that their back is against the wall and they might as well use that force and go for broke."   

        "It's almost illogical what's going on," says U.S. Army Gen. Gary E. Luck, who wears three hats as commander in chief of the United Nations Command, Combined Forces Command (South Korean-U.S.) and U.S. Forces Korea. "The best thing to happen would be for a negotiated peace to break out all over. We don't want to fight here, but I know how to do it."   

        If war does return to Korea, it will not be a replay of Operation Desert Storm. Timing, terrain and the nature of the enemy all argue against so painless and swift an outcome amid the cramped urban sprawl of newly industrialized South Korea. America would not have the luxury it enjoyed in the gulf: six months to assemble its forces and train them free from the threat of major attack. Instead, half a dozen American divisions -- or more than 100,000 fresh troops from the United States -- on their way to reinforce the 36,000 U.S. troops in Korea might be forced to battle North Korean attacks on air bases, ports and roads as well as streams of southbound refugees.   

        American casualties were light in the gulf war because U.S. forces battered the Iraqis from the air and maneuvered around them, virtually surrounding the enemy while minimizing head-on clashes. Korea's mountainous terrain, with few passable corridors, will channel the armies into eachother. "Force will meet force and there will be horribledestruction," says one Pentagon official. "The general," adds an American battalion commander in Korea, "tellsus this will be a machine-gun war."   

        A second Korean war, however, would not be a tug of war for turf like the first one. The Pentagon's war plan 5027-92 for defending the Republic of Korea calls for South Koreans and Americans to strike at the North's command centers and heavy weapons and for U.S. aircraft to attack Pyongyang from the start, trying to disrupt communications and cripple the North's air defenses. Without consistent artillery support and protection from the skies, the North's troops would be exposed and vulnerable.   

        Although North Korea has the world's fourth- or fifth-largest standing army with 1.2 million men under arms backed by 8,400 artillery pieces and 2,400 mobile rocket launchers -- America's high-tech weapons and sophisticated strategy should guarantee victory, albeit a costly one, in a second Korean war.   

        If the worst happens, war would most likely begin much as it did in the summer of 1950. Two thirds of North Korea's Army is deployed just along and north of the border. "Technically, all they have to do is crank up and turn left," says one Pentagon official.   

        Weather factors. In summer, late June or early July would be favored because monsoon rains shroud Korea's mountains in clouds and fog and impede the vastly superior American and South Korean air forces. In winter, the best month to head south would be January, when the rivers and rice paddies are frozen solid and tanks and tracked vehicles can maneuver off the roads south and north of the Imjin and Han rivers, respectively.   

        From the start, a second Korean war would be fought on two fronts. South of Seoul on both coasts, North Korean submarines and patrol boats would deliver special warfare troops in rubber dinghies while waves of Soviet-designed Antonov-2 troop transports -- ancient biplane relics of the 1940s that fly low, slowly and quietly and whose cloth-covered bodies are remarkably stealthy when it comes to modern radar -- slipped in over the sea. Sabotage teams would parachute from them into the dark hills.   

        The saboteurs -- drawn from North Korea's 100,000-man special forces -- are supposed to cripple operations at the vital port of Pusan, attack airfields, blow bridges on resupply routes, sever communications links and generally sow confusion and chaos behind American and South Korean lines. The threat is so serious that every year one of the three major U.S.-South Korean joint military exercises focuses entirely on countering the North's special forces.   

        While airborne troops dropped behind South Korean and American lines, large numbers of North Korean foot soldiers might move, three abreast, through 20 or more suspected North Korean invasion tunnels hand-drilled through the solid granite far below the mine belts, booby traps and concertina-wire barriers on the southern edge of the 2-mile-wide DMZ (box, Page 50). At the tunnels' south ends, the last 10 yards of rock would be removed by hand and pickax and rolled down an incline to storage rooms.   

        At the appointed hour the first North Koreans would emerge from the tunnels on the reverse slopes of hills overlooking the valleys leading south, carrying AK 47 rifles, machine guns and mortars. Behind them would come hand-towed light artillery, recoilless rifles and antiaircraft weapons. Part of the force would head back up the hills to attack ROK (Republic of Korea) forward units from the rear; the rest would move swiftly down into the valleys to seize the first line of "ROK drops," ingenious highway overpasses that are designed to be dropped to block every road leading south.   

        During four decades of armed truce, the South Koreans have worked at making the trip south a nightmare for an invading army. The handful of natural invasion corridors, the valleys, have been walled and ditched from mountain slope to mountain slope every 6 to 8 miles. Time and progress have also changed the old invasion route. Seoul's urban sprawl now extends 10 miles north, and crowded highways slow traffic to a crawl. "People tend to live in the valleys, and that's your attack corridor," says one Pentagon official. "The taxis in Seoul alone would be a significant roadblock for any armored assault by North Korean forces."   

        For the South, the brunt of the early fighting would be borne by the ROK's 655,000-man conscript Army, a force that American military leaders say is well trained and well disciplined, although not equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry. The South Koreans have six brigades of special forces, who would head north to do unto the North Koreans' communications, airfields and roads what Pyongyang's paratroopers and tunnel troops would try to do to the South. "They know what they're doing and how to do it," says General Luck. "They will acquit themselves very well."   

        Standing alongside the ROK Army shielding the capital of Seoul is the U.S. Army's 2nd Infantry Division, the last American ground combat force left in Korea. The division commander, Maj. Gen. John Abrams, bristles at any suggestion that his soldiers are a tripwire force or, in the gulf-war parlance, "speed bumps." "Ours is one of the most powerful divisions in the Army," he says. "Our assets are tremendous and unique. We have heavy firepower, the ability to work this restricted terrain and the ability to conduct maneuver warfare in both offense and defense. We are tailored to the threat and to the terrain."   

        With its two armor brigades of M1A1 tanks (named after General Abrams's father, the late Gen. Creighton Abrams) and Bradley fighting vehicles and two battalions of Airmobile light infantry, backed by a heavy four-battery battalion of multiple-launch rocket system (MLRS) launchers, the 2nd Infantry forms the mobile operational reserve of the ROK VI Corps north of the Han River. The 2nd Division also includes a 200-strong engineer detachment trained to clear roadblocks swiftly and a 275-person bridge-building company that can throw a tank-capable bridge across a river in three or four hours.   

        John Abrams is a soldiers' general, frequently dropping in to talk with his 17,500 American and Korean troops scattered in 16 camps and base areas between the DMZ and the Han River. In January and February, with temperatures as low as 42 degrees below zero, Abrams's brigades rotated through winter war games in the rugged Korean countryside. The general, who stayed in the field throughout the exercises, spent only one night in his comfortable truck- mounted commander's quarters before ordering it hauled back to base. For the next five weeks Abrams lived rough and showered communally, like everyone else.   

        Its modern weaponry aside, Abrams's division resembles the old Army: U.S. soldiers assigned to Korea pull a one-year hardship tour, unaccompanied by their families, and live in old-fashioned barracks. "This is the last unit of its type in the Army," says Abrams. "We live, eat, train and work together, seven days a week. You make a commitment to 12 months of full-time soldiering when you come to this division. A year of this and I guarantee you will be at the top of your form as a soldier."   

        Turnover trouble. That one-year tour, however, means a constant turnover in personnel of the kind that plagued U.S. forces in Vietnam. Every Thursday evening a plane lands at Seoul's Kimpo International Airport with 250 replacements for the 2nd Infantry.   

        Many young captains, however, voluntarily extend their Korean tours by at least 12 months in order to command in the 2nd Division. Capt. Cathy Berba, the daughter and granddaughter of Army general officers, signed on for an extra 18 months to make the most of a chance to command the transportation company in the 702nd Main Supply Battalion.   

        Lt. Col. Scott Lingamfelter of Richmond, Va., commands the 6th Battalion of the 37th Field Artillery, the largest multiple-launch rocket battalion in the Army. His four batteries of 36 MLRS mobile launchers can devastate vast areas from more than 20 miles away. In time of war the 6/37th's launchers and ammunition trucks would go mobile, shooting and scooting to avoid return fire.   

        The 2nd Infantry's northernmost unit, the 1st Battalion of the 506th Infantry (Air Assault), holds the line at Camp Greaves, on a hilltop within sight of the huge North Korean flag that flies behind the truce village of Panmunjom. Command Sgt. Maj. Edgar Adams's troops help guard the long, one-lane Freedom Bridge over the gluey mudbanks of the Imjin River. Like every other bridge from the Han River north, the old converted railroad bridge that leads to Panmunjom is wired to be blown up.   

        "We patrol day and night, we train, we exercise, we train some more, and if the other guys come this way they will have cause to regret it," says Adams, a Vietnam veteran from Tyler, Texas. "The soldiers here quickly assimilate the fact that this is a no-shit mission." Behind him a platoon practices putting on gas masks and charcoal-impregnated suits to protect against chemical weapons.   

        North Korea has both chemical weapons and the means to deliver them, but the decision to use such weapons would be a difficult one, just as it was for Saddam Hussein in the gulf war. "That is a big threshold to cross," says one senior American military official. The unspoken threat is that the Americans would respond by attacking North Korea's entire civilian infrastructure -- power plants, dams and factories.   

        Whether or not Pyongyang decided to gamble on chemical weapons, the North Korean advance units' sights would be on Sergeant Adams's 1st Battalion and the rest of the South Korean and U.S. front line. If the North could seize the booby-trapped road barriers, the way south would be in its hands. If pressed, it could blow them and prevent the Americans and South Koreans from reinforcing or withdrawing troops trapped to the north.   

        As the first garbled reports of an attack began crackling over the ROK radios, the North Koreans would unleash the modern artillery corps that is their Army's center of gravity. More than 11,000 big guns and rocket launchers, many of them dug into hardened sites inside the mountains, would open fire in the biggest artillery barrage since World War II. Only the towed and tracked mobile guns that travel south with the Army are vulnerable to the U.S. Army's superb radar directed counterbattery fire; the North Korean Peoples Army's big guns could fire from inside the granite mountains until they ran out of ammunition or until the fighting moved south beyond their range.   

        Some of the North's bigger and better artillery pieces can reach Seoul, 25 miles south of the DMZ, and the 12 million citizens who live in and around the South Korean capital would get their wake-up call for war when shells began falling among their densely packed high-rises. Notoriously inaccurate but deadly Scud missiles would be fired at Seoul, at Inchon port, at Osan Air Base south of Seoul and at Pusan port, adding to civilian casualties and the general confusion.   

        Unfriendly fire. But the bulk of the North's artillery would be aimed at ROK and U.S. bases north of the Han River to drive defenders into their bunkers. Much of the artillery fire, however, would not be directed by forward observers and would do far more damage to the millions of civilians living in the northern quarter of South Korea than to ROK and U.S. forces.   

        South Korean and American artillery would respond by firing preplanned patterns in support of outposts and bases under attack in the northernmost defense zone. ROK forces would fan out from their camps and take up positions in predug trenches and pillboxes on the ridges guarding the valleys. Every inch of the ground has been mapped and measured, and cards with that information are posted in every trench.   

        In both Koreas orders would go out mobilizing the reserves. Each country has approximately 5 million trained reservists and former soldiers subject to immediate call-up.   

        Meanwhile, as squadrons of U.S. Air Force fighters scrambled to take off from Osan Air Base, 8th Army Headquarters would flash word of the attack to the Pentagon and the White House. Within hours, American air reinforcements would be en route to Korea: B-1 and B-52 bombers with full bomb bays would lift off from mainland U.S. bases to strike targets in Korea, then land in Guam and Okinawa, where follow-up strikes would be mounted. Fighters and bombers based in Japan would be first into action over Korea; F-15s, FB-111s and F-117 Stealth fighter-bombers would begin closing on Korea from Alaska, Hawaii and the continental United States.   

        Aircraft carriers from the U.S. 7th Fleet also would be ordered to Korean waters. If tensions were rising prior to the North Korean attack, a U.S. carrier would be no more than 48 hours from Korea. But if the attack caught the United States by surprise the carriers could be a week away.   

        South Korea outclasses the North in surface combat ships, with 9 destroyers and 29 frigates, but the North has 25 submarines, 175 torpedo boats and 145 antiship missile boats that are especially effective along the coasts. Defense experts have warned that the U.S.-ROK forces are seriously deficient in minesweeping capabilities. And the North's diesel submarines would almost certainly venture south to attack allied shipping headed into Pusan port.   

        Within 24 hours of a North Korean attack, U.S. Air Force C-5 and C-141 transports would begin flying in the 21,000 U.S. marines based in Japan and Okinawa, a Marine Expeditionary Force from California, the Army's 25th Light Infantry Division from Hawaii and elements of the 9th Light Infantry from Fort Lewis, Wash., to reinforce General Abrams's 2nd Infantry Division.   

        Again, if rising tensions had prompted American military planners to bolster South Korea's defenses, a second Army division -- perhaps the 101st Air Assault Division from Fort Campbell, Ky., with Blackhawk troop-carrying helicopters and Apache helicopters to provide tank-killing punch -- would already have been dispatched to Korea.   

        In an emergency, allied forces would draw on supplies and equipment pre positioned on Guam and on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. With enough warning, the Pentagon also could pre-position heavy stockpiles of ammunition and supplies, including laser-guided smart bombs, in Korea and Japan.   

        There are, however, serious questions about how quickly and how efficiently an American buildup would proceed: The Defense Department's inspector general recently reported logistical shortfalls in South Korea, including insufficient docks and shortages in aircraft hangars and parking hardstands as well as problems with rail facilities, trucks, cargo-handling equipment, stevedores and warehousing.   

        As the Americans struggled to reinforce their troops in Korea, the North Koreans would find the battlefield shrinking on them. Although there are half a dozen avenues of attack, the two critical ones aimed at the heart of Seoul are the Kaesong-Munsan and Chorwon corridors. The enemy attack would have to be directed down them. The North Koreans would have to commit their 3,500 tanks and 4,000 armored personnel carriers to maintain the momentum of their attack, and they would have to begin moving their artillery out of its hardened emplacements in order to support their advancing forces.   

        As the great armies clashed, the American plans would call for an armada of American aircraft now in and around Korea to begin turning the tide of battle. The air campaign in war plan 5027-92 calls for simultaneous attacks on all elements of North Korea's war machine.   

        Senior Pentagon officials expect that U.S. planes would own the skies within a few days. Although the North Koreans have a 750- plane air force, their most modern fighters, MiG-29s, are expected to be held back in underground airfields to defend critical government and industrial areas around Pyongyang and supply bases around Wonsan on the east coast. A wave of second-line fighters, old MiG 21s and Su-7s, would fly south in hopes of catching ROK and U.S. aircraft on the ground. Few of them would be likely to make it back to North Korea.   

        Keeping the North's jets from flying would be only half the challenge. The allies also would need to neutralize North Korea's network of antiaircraft guns and radar-guided surface-to-air missiles. Although most of North Korea's 54 antiaircraft missile sites are situated to protect Pyongyang and key northern industrial targets, the columns of invading North Korean infantry would be shielded by some hardened SAM sites and 8,800 twin- and quad- barreled 23- and 37-mm antiaircraft guns.   

        Hardened SA-2 missile sites, with their radars underground, are difficult to attack; American planners want to be able to pounce on them anytime they turn on their radars. "If you can make them stay underground, you've essentially eliminated them as a defense," says a senior Pentagon planner. That leaves Pyongyang's antiaircraft artillery. Using tactics from an old Soviet playbook, the North Korean People's Army would throw up a blizzard of iron over the narrow valleys in hopes that the American jets would fly through it.   

        The Air Force, however, has no intention of playing that fool's game. The American jets, weather permitting, would drop smart bombs from altitudes above 12,000 feet, where North Korean antiaircraft artillery would be much less effective. Antiaircraft fire also would not be very effective at night, and round-the-clock U.S. operations would wear down the North's gunners. "If somebody's attacking you 24 hours a day, the gun barrels will melt," says one senior planner. "You can't shoot all the time."   

        Once the North's air forces and air defenses were neutralized, its advancing infantry and armor would become easier game for round- the-clock attacks by F 117 Stealth fighters, F-15Es and F-111s. "The main thing we'd do to disrupt and destroy the tempo of that infantry coming south is bomb the living hell out of them," says one Pentagon planner.   

        As the terrain channeled the attack into the valleys, the U.S. Air Force's J STARS surveillance aircraft would spot North Korean movements, no matter what the weather, and American jets would begin sowing Gator mines to help push enemy armor into narrow killing zones. "The Chorwon valley is going to be a burning junkyard of twisted and burning bodies and vehicles," says a key Pentagon official. All the while, stealthy F-117s would lead attacks on Pyongyang's command-and-control centers, other key facilities and the nuclear facility at Yongbyon.   

        With the valleys choked and the attack stalled, North Korean light infantry would probably take to the hills, and at this point the second Korean war would begin to look a lot like the first Korean War. Mortars, machine guns, rifles and grenades are still the tools of the infantryman's trade, and here, too, the Americans and ROK soldiers would have a high-tech edge: Individual night-vision equipment would make them the masters of the darkness.   

        Could North Korea capture Seoul? The South Korean capital is bisected by the broad Han River. Seventeen bridges span the Han, each fitted with drop spans designed and prewired to be blown as a last resort, turning any attack into an amphibious assault. If the North Koreans do make it across the Han, ROK forces intend to fight, house by house and block by block, for whatever is left of their capital after North Korean missile and artillery barrages. "To say that you can protect it [Seoul] from harm doesn't make any sense. However, we can protect the functionality of the city of Seoul," says a Pentagon official. "I can't imagine it would be completely occupied under any circumstance."   

        Pyongyang's Plan B would bypass the capital. "The difficulties of going past it are that if they move quickly, they would stretch their logistical train," says a Pentagon planner. "They would be more vulnerable to air attack."   

        In the American plan, the NKPA, with its brittle top-down command, control, communications and intelligence severed by American air attacks, its SAM missiles and artillery bottled up and blinded, and its lines of communication, resupply and reinforcement cut, would begin to wither and die. Half-starved survivors would head back north, first in retreat, then in a full-scale rout, pursued by South Korean forces who would not stop at the hated DMZ.   

        If Pyongyang tried a no-warning attack, that death would come more quickly. If the North Koreans opted for full mobilization beforehand, defeat would take a few more weeks. And this time neither China nor Russia would be likely to bail out the two Kims and their hermit Kimdom.   

        But this could be the most dangerous moment of the entire war: Forced to choose between accepting total defeat and threatening to use a nuclear weapon, North Korea's leaders might opt for the latter. In the end, though, a second Korean war would end almost exactly as Kim Il Sung envisioned, with one difference: A shattered Korea would be unified again, but not under the control of either the Great Leader or his son.   

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