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 ya
