SIX

WAR MACHINE AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Mission Accomplished

In February 2017, six months before a tipping point in North Korea’s nuclear program, Kim Jong Un was standing in front of a camouflage-painted ballistic missile while giving orders to a coterie of officials with their omnipresent notebooks and pens.

The center of attention wasn’t him, but a polished metal sphere—a miniaturized nuclear warhead. Wearing a beige military overcoat with a fur collar and a Russian-style fur hat, Kim was master of the universe. He was telling the world that he had achieved a remarkable technological feat despite international sanctions and pressures.

Like Pakistan, another impoverished nation run by its armed forces—and which, not coincidentally, is North Korea’s most important WMD partner—North Korea is today a significant nuclear power. North Korea is now able to theoretically hit the United States with nuclear-warhead-tipped ICBMs.

At precisely 12:00 p.m. on September 3, 2017, the ground shook with a fury at Pungye-ri, North Korea’s nuclear test site, as North Korea conducted its first thermonuclear bomb test. Shortly thereafter, Ri Chun Hee, the ubiquitous North Korean anchor, announced, “The test of a hydrogen bomb designed to be mounted on an ICBM was a perfect success!”¹ Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) released a picture of the Supreme Leader inspecting a peanut-shaped thermonuclear warhead painted white. This time Kim was wearing a black Mao suit, as were all those who surrounded him.

Foreign observers didn’t just take Ri’s word for it. “When I look at a thing that size, I as a military officer assume that it’s a hydrogen bomb,” said U.S. Air Force general John E. Hyten, commander of the Strategic Command. “I saw the event. I saw the indications from that event.”² According to a nuclear specialist, the bomb tested in September 2017 had a yield in excess of 100 kilotons—powerful enough to kill more than 2 million people if it was dropped on Seoul. For comparison purposes, the bombs detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki “were less than 0.1 percent as powerful as modern hydrogen bombs.”³

U.S. secretary of defense James Mattis warned North Korea that “any threat to the United States or its territory, including Guam or our allies, will be met with a massive military response.”⁴ Yet the reality was that after six North Korean nuclear tests, the United States had few viable options. Talk of a preemptive military strike against North Korea hit a peak after the September 2017 hydrogen bomb test, but everyone knew that any massive U.S. military operation against North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile sites would most certainly entail North Korean retaliations against the U.S. forces in Korea or South Korea’s own military forces. Another problem would involve real-time intelligence on North Korean nuclear assets: obtaining accurate information on North Korea, especially its military, is always problematic, but the intelligence would have to be nearly perfect if a massive military strike was to be carried out effectively. Moreover, the United States and South Korea would have to be ready for all-out war if such a preemptive strike actually took place—a prospect that no South Korean government would agree to.

Trump’s famous roller-coaster North Korea policy—from “fire and fury” to “I’m in love with Kim Jong Un”—was on full display after the test. “North Korea is a rogue nation which has become a great threat and embarrassment to China, which is trying to help but with little success,” Trump said. “South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!”⁵

Two months after North Korea tested its hydrogen bomb, the Earth’s crust shifted as part of the aftershocks. “When you have a large nuclear test, it moves the earth’s crust around the area,” a U.S. Geological Survey official said, “and it takes a while for it to fully subside. We’ve had a few of them since the sixth [North Korean] nuclear test.”⁶ A seismologist noted that “these aftershocks for a 6.3 magnitude nuclear test are not very surprising … the fact that the source of the earthquake is an explosion doesn’t change how we expect the energy to redistribute.”⁷

Exploding a nuclear weapon that literally shakes the planet is no mean feat for a nation that can hardly feed its people. It was under Kim Jong Il in October 2006 that North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon. A little over a decade later, his son, Kim Jong Un, succeeded in exploding a hydrogen bomb. North Korea achieved what many said could never be done: indigenously developing, testing, and manufacturing nuclear weapons.

Until 2006, when Pyongyang conducted its first nuclear test, major political figures sympathetic to North Korea, such as former minister of unification Jung Sae-hyun, argued vociferously that North Korea would never develop nuclear weapons. Even if it did, he asserted, such a weapon would be targeted against the United States, not South Korea. After Pyongyang tested its first bomb in 2006, however, Jung and others like him claimed that North Korea’s nuclear weapons were “purely defensive,” as a protective measure against a hostile United States. If Washington provides a firm security guarantee, drops sanctions, and normalizes ties, they argue, North Korea will give up its nuclear capabilities.

“North Korea seeks to exchange normalization of relations between North Korea and the United States,” said Jung. Further, “normalization of ties can be achieved by guaranteeing regime security, and military threats can be mitigated by signing a peace treaty.”⁸

The South Korean left, which in its own way is just as hypernationalistic as North Korea, maintains that North Korea has the right to defend itself against the United States, which continues to provide South Korea with a nuclear umbrella. However, they oppose any scenario in which South Korea develops its own nuclear armament, since such a move would affect the military balance between the two Koreas and would inevitably be seen as a threat by North Korea.

Such naiveté runs strong in South Korea; after all, no outside power such as the United States or China can guarantee regime security. Yes, the Chinese will continue to provide vital economic and energy assistance to North Korea. Yes, so long as the left is in power in South Korea, the Blue House will push for more engagement, assistance, and investments. But ruthless dictators can survive for a long time. Take Syria: Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000 and began a bloody genocide in 2011 when civil war erupted during the Arab Spring. More than 500,000 Syrians have died, but Assad remains in power. Russia and Iran sent troops to bolster Assad, and with a haphazard Western (especially American) policy toward Syria, Assad will hold on to power for some time.

So long as China and Russia protect North Korea, Kim Jong Un can survive, perhaps even thrive. In the long run, however, contradictory forces within North Korea cannot but mount. Greater information flows will be met with harsher crackdowns. Twenty-five million avatars can’t be controlled like robots. The Kim dynasty’s ability to control North Koreans is already weakening. At some point down the road, little pockets of dissent will appear. There will be a backlash against those too; the regime has no compunction about holding public executions and forcing family members and the public to watch them. Fear is the currency of control, but already money is partially cushioning fear.

For Kim Jong Un, the nuclear dream begun by his grandfather and pursued by his father is now virtually complete. The young dictator has shown the world and his people, but most importantly his generals and regional powers, that he is now a major military figure to be reckoned with. It doesn’t make any difference if the world continues to mock North Korea, because Kim is laughing all the way to the bank. For Kim, Koreans on both sides of the DMZ can be proud: finally the Korean nation is a nuclear power.

The Foundations of the War Machine

Kim Il Sung’s existential lesson from the Korean War—a conflict that he unleashed thinking he could win it within a few months, provided that the Americans didn’t intervene—was delivered by superior U.S. airpower, which pummeled his forces. Kim rebuilt the Korean People’s Army after the three-year war ended in a draw, but he was determined to strike at the heart of the United States one day.

Even his generals would have laughed at the Great Leader if he had told them he was going to build nuclear weapons. North Korea had no technical expertise with which to jump-start a nuclear weapons program in the 1960s. Yet Kim Il Sung was determined to have the one weapon that would both deter the United States and, if needed, destroy South Korea: nuclear bombs. For the time being, however, he placed emphasis on making North Korea a vast war machine with the KPA at its nucleus.

Like the state itself, the KPA was made possible only with the support of the Soviet Union, although here too North Korea has progressively erased the narrative of the USSR’s critical role in giving birth to the KPA. On February 8, 1948, seven months before the founding of North Korea, the KPA held its first parade in Pyongyang. The Rodong Sinmun showed a picture of the top North Korean leadership watching the parade under a large picture of Kim Il Sung and a banner that read “Long Live General Kim Il Sung, Our Nation’s Leader!” North Korea’s propaganda machinery, however, wasn’t satisfied that the KPA was established in 1948. In February 1978, the party newspaper proclaimed that actually the army had been founded in 1932 when Kim Il Sung created the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army (KPRA).⁹ As Fyodor Tertitskiy writes, however, this was a big lie:

The problem was, of course, that the entire story of the “Korean People’s Revolutionary Army” was a complete and utter fabrication. Kim Il Sung was a middle-ranking member of an anti-Japanese partisan movement in Manchukuo, which was led by Chinese fighters. The movement was crushed and Kim fled to the Soviet Union. This is not what they teach in North Korea, as Pyongyang claims not only that the “Korean People’s Revolutionary Army” existed but also that it was the force that defeated Imperial Japan.¹⁰

North Korea celebrates both dates, 1932 and 1948, since Pyongyang argues that the KPRA was the precursor of the KPA. It is essential to the mythology of the Kim dynasty that Kim Il Sung not only fought against Imperialist Japan (which he did, though only in a bit part) but also founded a revolutionary army. And as small as his role might have been, Kim Il Sung is the only member of the Kim dynasty who actually fought in a military campaign. Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un never entered military service, as do all other able-bodied North Korean men and women.

In February 1958, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the KPA, Kim Il Sung made this statement: “The Marxist-Leninist army that is the KPA is the army of the Korean Workers’ Party.” As innocuous as it might sound to those not experienced in reading between the lines, this language signaled the beginning of massive purges in the party and the armed forces.¹¹ The Soviet and Yenan factions—Korean communist leaders who had close links with the Soviet and Chinese communist parties, respectively—were purged and replaced by officers who belonged to the Manchurian faction, or those aligned with Kim Il Sung.

“Like all other people’s organizations, the armed forces can only survive under the orders of the party and cannot be elevated above the party,” said Kim Il Sung in September 1960.¹² Thereafter, the KPA would be guided by two iron-clad principles: to serve as an instrument of the party and, by extension, to serve Kim Il Sung and later his son Kim Jong Il. The primordial mission of the KPA was not to safeguard the state but to pay allegiance to and serve the Kim dynasty.

After the postwar rebuilding, the North Korean military went through substantial modernization beginning in the 1960s. Kim Il Sung announced four military guidelines: (1) arming the entire people, (2) fortifying the entire nation, (3) strengthening the readiness of the entire armed forces, and (4) modernizing the entire armed forces. The KPA expanded rapidly during this time, from 400,000 to about 700,000 troops, with commensurate modernization and creation of the 8th Army Corps for unconventional warfare.¹³

In parallel with the rise of Kim Jong Il as the anointed heir in the early 1970s, the KPA began the second phase of rapid expansion and modernization. “By 1979, North Korea surpassed South Korea in military manpower and the KPA’s mobility increased rapidly through mechanization … and in 1976, military development became one of the four core pillars of the people’s economy.”14

While the NDC was the most powerful organ in the North Korean government during the Kim Jong Il era, when songun, the military-first policy, was supreme, Kim Jong Un abolished the NDC and replaced it with the SAC, as noted in Chapter Five. Under his father, the KPA’s grip had grown much too strong, and Kim Jong Un wanted to solidify his control over the armed forces, which he did through targeted purges of military personnel and by placing trusted lieutenants into key positions.

As supreme commander of the KPA and all military and paramilitary units in North Korea, Kim exerts nearly total control over the armed forces. The General Staff reports directly to him (see Figure 6) on military matters, while the Guard Command, Ministry of People’s Security, Ministry of State Security, and Reconnaissance General Bureau also report solely to Kim.

The strength of North Korea’s C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, and surveillance) lies in a rigorous hierarchy that enables the rapid mobilization and concentration of forces. Speed, firepower, and motivation are the hallmarks of the KPA. Yet its very organizational structure is also its inherent weakness. In the midst of a major war or a crisis, such intangible factors as flexibility, innovation, agility, and adaptability are essential to react to changes in the environment and to shape successful action. But given the multiple layers of political, intelligence, and surveillance oversight over each of the component commands in the KPA and the restricted information flows among them, severe bottlenecks could arise, with devastating effects.

Fine-tuning the party’s penetration of all military units through its Central Military Commission (also headed by Kim Jong Un) while ensuring maximum military autonomy to the extent possible within the confines of the North Korean military system is a critical task. What sets the KPA apart from its counterpart in South Korea or even the U.S. military is that the KPA is organized, trained, and equipped to fight a blitzkrieg-type war in order to maintain the “correlation of forces,” a translated Soviet term that encompasses all of the relevant components for a military operation to succeed, such as military and economic power, political stability, technological prowess, and military strategy, throughout the initial phases of combat.

Consequently, its training system is designed to produce tough, intensively trained troops who can travel farther and faster with more equipment and less food than most of their counterparts in other armies. These troops are mentally and physically hardened, disciplined and taught to suffer privations that would challenge cohesion in other armies. Complementing this is a course of prolonged political and ideological training designed to produce well-indoctrinated soldiers who believe that because of their ideological training and moral superiority they can defeat a numerically and technologically superior enemy. Combat training emphasises individual fighting skills, mountain warfare, night combat, infiltration, unconventional warfare and achieving assigned objectives regardless of costs.¹⁵

The KPA’s troops are underfed and poorly housed, and they have less sophisticated weapons than the ROK military. But lifelong indoctrination coupled with a messianic commitment to attacking and defeating the South if called to do so is the foundational essence of the KPA. Nothing else matters. Should another Korean War break out, ROK and U.S. forces would ultimately prevail, but at extremely high costs. The KPA is a finely tuned war machine, and while it may lose at the very end, it will also destroy everything in its path as it fights the next major war on the Korean Peninsula.

False Peace and the South-North Military Balance

Tens of thousands of KPA soldiers and civilians train for several months to hold the annual massive parade celebrating the founding of the KPA—although in 2018 there were two celebrations, the other marking the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the DPRK.

As the military units goose-step past Kim Jong Un, the soldiers turn their heads to the right in unison, acknowledging the Supreme Leader. North Korea also usually shows off its newest ballistic missiles, including ICBMs. In the February and September 2018 parades no ICBMs were visible. This was because Kim was in the midst of courting Trump with the help of Moon. Moreover, for the time being, there was no more need to show off the ICBMs, since the world knew he had them.

Trump quickly took credit for their absence, tweeting “Thank you to Chairman Kim. We will both prove everyone wrong! There is nothing like good dialogue from two people that like each other! Much better than before I took office.”¹⁶ Just because Kim didn’t show off his ICBMs, it didn’t mean he was on the verge of giving them up. As Jeffrey Lewis writes:

One explanation was that the lack of ICBMs may well have been China’s price for sending Li Zhanshu, a member of China’s Politburo [to represent Xi at the parade].… Beijing may well have asked North Korea to tone down the parade.… Kim has figured out that, having completed North Korea’s nuclear deterrent, he can have his cake and eat it, too. By denuclearization, Kim Jong-un doesn’t mean giving up his nuclear weapons. Instead, he means a process by which nuclear weapons recede into the background. He’s willing [to] forego nuclear testing and certain missile tests. He’s also willing to stop showing off his nuclear-armed missiles in his parades. And in exchange, he’s expecting the United States and its allies in Asia to stop complaining about it. In other words, he stops brandishing the bomb, and we pretend the problem is solved. He is asking the United States to accept North Korea’s nuclear status on the same terms that it does with Israel.¹⁷

In terms of sheer numbers, the KPA’s conventional force, with its 1.2 million troops, overshadows South Korea’s, with 670,000. Since Seoul lies only fifty kilometers from the DMZ, a major war using only conventional weapons would be devastating. If the KPA used biochemical weapons, as they would in a full-scale war, Seoul and other major urban areas would be effectively shut down.

What is more relevant, however, is the advantage of geography and how rapidly North Korea would be able to mount a massive attack against the South. After announcing the Pyongyang Declaration in September 2018, including extensive military confidence-building measures, each side agreed to take down eleven guard posts within the DMZ—although North Korea started out with two and half times more guard posts than South Korea. These guard posts are in the no-man’s-land on both sides of the 38th parallel. The DMZ has the greatest concentration of land mines, heavy artillery, and tanks in the world, and initially, under the 1953 armistice agreement, no guard posts were allowed within it. But they continued to be built and maintained in order to ensure hair-trigger alert.

The South Korean Ministry of National Defense announced in November 2018 that “all weapons, military personnel, and equipment in the 11 GPs [guard posts] that were agreed to be dismantled through the South-North military agreement were tabulated on the 10th of last month, and from the 11th, dismantlement of the facilities were begun.”¹⁸ The Moon government emphasizes that such steps will result in fundamental changes in the North Korean military threat. Joint exercises between the U.S. Forces Korea and ROK forces have been curtailed or postponed to provide added incentives to North Korea. But North Korea’s military posture and strategy toward the South hasn’t changed.

Analyzing the severity and magnitude of multiple threats emanating from North Korea and calibrating the military balance between the two Koreas is more art than science. The bulk of the North’s land forces are stationed very close to the 38th parallel in order to take advantage of the line’s geographic proximity to Seoul. But analysts think that “although North Korea’s armed forces are equipped with a wide range of conventional military systems, including large numbers of artillery pieces and multiple-launch rocket systems, its conventional forces have become weaker, compared with those of South Korea and its US ally.”¹⁹ This is precisely why North Korea has pursued robust asymmetrical weapons capabilities.

The South Korean troops are much better equipped, with better food and better living conditions. Conscripts serve nineteen months, compared to ten years for North Korean men. The KPA isn’t concerned about its soldiers’ welfare or about preparing them for civilian life after their period of service. But on balance, the KPA’s ability to endure hardships and to follow orders is invariably higher than that of their South Korean counterparts.

The Pentagon’s 2017 annual report to Congress on military developments in North Korea noted that “reunification with the ROK, by force if necessary, is a key component of North Korea’s national identity, validating its policies and strategies, and justifying the sacrifices demanded of the populace. However, North Korea’s leaders almost certainly recognize that achieving forceful reunification under North Korea’s control is unattainable so long as the ROK has greater military capabilities and an alliance with the United States.”²⁰

More problematic is the Moon government’s belief that military tensions between the two Koreas are receding to the extent that Seoul can afford to relax its defensive stance. By 2022, South Korea’s ground forces are slated to be cut by 118,000, owing partly to the falling number of service-eligible men and partly to the transition to a more technologically advanced but leaner force structure. However, it is also true that in the case of stability operations over North Korea—such as dismantling and controlling all nuclear and WMD sites, providing immediate humanitarian assistance, ensuring a viable civil security mechanism, and maintaining political stability—the ROK would need a minimum of 260,000 to 400,000 troops.²¹

To be sure, South Korea has made major strides forward in its defense. South Korea is one of the most powerful Asian economies, and the ROK forces are fully modernized and feature formidable defense and deterrence assets. Moreover, South Korean Air Force pilots fly an average of some 130 hours per year, compared to 30–40 hours for their North Korean counterparts. Critically, the 28,000-strong U.S. contingent is a key deterrent, with the ability to bring in strategic assets from U.S. bases in Japan, Guam, Hawaii (headquarters of the Indo-Pacific Command), and the continental United States.

In July 2018, President Moon received briefings on Defense Reform 2.0, a plan that places inordinate emphasis on modernized firepower. But the reality is that within five years, as force cuts are implemented, the area of defense each division is responsible for is going to increase from twenty to forty square kilometers. “How the government is going to make up this deficit remains unclear. A defense policy that is premised on a belief that ‘the outbreak of war is unlikely’ is political populism.… It has also been reported that the framework of a new offensive operational concept has been put on hold.”²²

The underlying assumption behind Moon’s decision to downgrade South Korea’s offensive capabilities is simple: not pursuing such steps will upset North Korea and derail inter-Korean détente. An army’s primary focus, however, must always remain on defeating the enemy by all possible military means. A gentler, kinder army isn’t going to win the next Korean War.

1979: The Tipping Point

Park Chung-hee’s assassination in 1979 resulted in massive political disruptions in South Korea, but it was also a major tipping point for the military balance on the Korean Peninsula. For Park, the most important national goal had been rapid economic modernization, and under his leadership, South Korea began its unparalleled economic transformation. Park was also an authoritarian leader who had become increasingly dictatorial after 1972. In October 1979, Park was killed by Kim Jae-kyu, a trusted aide and director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency at the time.

As previously noted, by 1979 North Korea had surpassed South Korea in virtually all aspects of military power, with a focus on developing ballistic missiles and other asymmetrical assets. In December 1979, Major General Chun Doo-hwan, who headed the powerful Defense Security Command—the military’s key intelligence agency—engineered a coup against Acting President Choi Kyu-ha, who had succeeded to the presidency after Park’s assassination. Choi had served as prime minister under Park but never exercised real power, nor did he have presidential ambitions.

The country was still nominally under civilian control, but real power lay with the generals, especially after the brutal military crackdown in Kwangju in May 1980 that resulted in the deaths of several hundred civilians. Chun created a military junta called the Special Committee for National Security Measures that was branded as an advisory body but served as one in name only. In reality, Chun ruled South Korea as head of the committee. Chun’s military coup had key consequences for South Korean defense. Park had been determined to attain greater self-sufficiency in defense, given South Korea’s critical dependence on the United States. Moreover, the withdrawal of the U.S. Seventh Infantry Division in 1971 as part of the so-called Nixon Doctrine (in which U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific were asked to assume a greater share of defense) and the downfall of South Vietnam in 1975 had convinced Park that South Korea could not always rely on the United States. It was imperative, Park thought, to have indigenous capabilities, including ballistic missiles.

Chun’s rise to power as president in August 1980 coincided with a heated presidential race in the United States, and as a result, the Carter administration didn’t have much leverage over him. The incoming Reagan administration in January 1981 grudgingly accepted Chun’s rise to the presidency, given the primacy of maintaining stability on the Korean Peninsula. At the same time, however, Washington also put immense pressure on Seoul to dismantle its ballistic missile program and forced it to sign a bilateral missile accord that tied Seoul’s hands. Given his lack of political legitimacy, Chun was in no position to argue with the Reagan administration. The net result was that by the early 1990s, North Korea was working on a nuclear weapons program at precisely the moment when South Korea’s ability to develop its own offensive capabilities against the North was stymied by its closest ally.

Although Chun always maintained that his military coup of December 1979 was motivated by worsening national security conditions following Park’s assassination, there were no indications that a North Korean attack was imminent or that the South Korean government was on the verge of collapse.

General John Wickham, who served as the commander in chief of the U.S. Forces Korea from July 1979 to June 1982, recalled the harrowing days following Park’s assassination and Chun’s rise to power. Right after Chun began to grab power in the ROK military in December 1979, Wickham wrote that a very senior South Korean three-star general visited him unexpectedly. Without any aides or translator present, the South Korean general asked Wickham if the United States would be willing to support a countercoup against Chun and his ilk.

Before responding, I took a moment to think through the ramifications. At a minimum, his group obviously wanted a tacit go-ahead for their endeavor, and it probably wanted an assurance that the United States would withhold the kind of withering criticism that was being heaped on Chun.… Obviously, I could not speak for the U.S. Government or Ambassador [William] Gleysteen. But we had already come close to civil war on the night of December 12 [when Chun’s forces overpowered the chairman of the Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff]. The general’s offer reopened that possibility with all of its inherent dangers, both for America to become caught between several contending factions, and for North Korea to exploit the situation.²³

Wickham replied that “the United States is not in the business of supporting coups and absolutely would not support any counteraction by the military faction [the general] represented or any other faction.”²⁴ In hindsight, though, Wickham wondered if his firm negative response (which Ambassador Gleysteen agreed with) could have been construed as tacit support for Chun. “It was U.S. policy not to [support Chun] at the time, but rather to keep Chun at arm’s length and to deal only with the legitimate authorities, although the faction the general represented undoubtedly perceived my response as a vote of support for Chun.”²⁵

North Korea understood that superior American firepower and an increasingly sophisticated ROK military could only be stopped with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Even as South Korea’s own missile program was being gutted at the beginning of the Chun government, North Korea was determined to develop its own nuclear weapons.

Glimpses of a Second Korean War

The biggest oxymoron in digesting military developments on the Korean Peninsula is the very phrase “demilitarized zone,” which refers to a strip of land about 250 kilometers long and 4 kilometers wide that cuts across the Korean Peninsula at roughly the 38th parallel.

Why? Because the world’s heaviest concentration of forces and firepower lies on either side of the DMZ. More than 800,000 North Korean ground forces and some 540,000 South Korean troops are positioned along or close to the DMZ, with thousands of long-range artillery pieces as well as numerous tanks, land mines, anti-tank barriers, and massive close air support.

War games are highly situation-specific, so even minor tweaks to a scenario will result in widely different outcomes. Among the many scenarios that American and South Korean forces plan and train for are those that involve very rapid escalation of tensions following a major crisis, such as another North Korean thermonuclear or ICBM test, the shooting down of a civilian airliner by North Korean missiles, or an indication that North Korea is about to launch a preemptive attack on the South in the belief that the United States—with or without the support of its South Korean allies—is planning an imminent attack on North Korea. The U.S. and ROK forces have developed a number of operational plans (OPLANs) that involve the KPA or a third country’s military intervention. According to Breaking Defense, OPLAN 5027 is the primary battle plan for repelling and defeating a North Korean invasion.²⁶

The exact contents of these and other OPLANs remain classified, but U.S. and ROK forces have also trained to take out North Korean WMD sites. An updated OPLAN 5027 was presumably made in 2016 to maximize counteroffensives against North Korea’s massive conventional forces buttressed by WMD assets. According to GlobalSecurity.org, the most recently updated OPLAN 5027 includes “pre-emptive strike plans on North Korea’s nuclear capable sites and weapons.”²⁷ OPLAN 5015 has been described as a “decapitation strike” that would seek to “swiftly neutralize North Korea’s top civilian and military leadership, as well as eliminate the threat of the country’s weapons of mass destruction—including both nuclear and chemical stockpiles—and ballistic missiles.”²⁸ In March 2016, the annual Key Resolve exercise was the biggest yet, with the participation of 300,000 ROK forces and 17,000 U.S. troops. According to press reports, this exercise was the first to test out OPLAN 5015.²⁹

Most analysts argue that South Korea and the United States will prevail in another Korean War, but at an extremely high cost for the allies. In the initial phases of war, tens of thousands will die in Seoul, with up to a million casualties across South Korea.³⁰ If North Korea uses biochemical weapons, hundreds of thousands in Seoul alone will die. In the event of a nuclear attack, hundreds of thousands in Seoul and other population centers will die.

Estimating casualties entails huge data input and a wide range of variables. According to the Joint Staff,

Calculating even the roughest “best-or-worst casualty estimates” for any conventional or nuclear attack is challenging.… Given Seoul’s vulnerability, casualty estimates will vary significantly depending upon the nature, intensity, and duration of a North Korean attack. Further complicating the calculation of casualty estimates is the ability of our ROK–U.S. Alliance forces to respond to a North Korean attack with counter-battery fire and coalition airstrikes, missions for which we train constantly.³¹

This doesn’t mean that ROK and U.S. forces will stand still. A massive counterattack will begin as soon as there is incontrovertible intelligence that a North Korean invasion is imminent.

The state of military play on the Korean Peninsula can perhaps be best understood by thinking about a Rubik’s cube. Looking only at one or two sides of the cube is like a two-dimensional drawing with limited insight into what Carl von Clausewitz called the “fog of war.” Only by looking at it holistically, through a three-dimensional prism, can one imagine the outbreak and evolution of the world’s fiercest battle.

The KPA enjoys four major advantages: numerical superiority coupled with rapid mobilization; long-range artillery that can pummel Seoul and adjacent targets; biochemical weapons; and special forces that can penetrate into key civilian and military targets in the South.

The first side of the Rubik’s cube entails the world’s biggest artillery barrage and ballistic missile attacks on Seoul, Incheon, and Busan in order to prevent incoming reinforcements from U.S. bases in Japan. Around 8,600 artillery pieces and 5,500 multiple rocket launchers will spew out millions of rounds to decimate South Korean defenses and kill as many civilians as possible. Some 200,000 special forces will infiltrate Seoul and other critical centers.

Tank columns and armored vehicles—about 6,700—will try to destroy South Korea’s defense perimeter and take Seoul hostage. With civilian casualties in the South numbering in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, Pyongyang’s calculus is that by threatening the use of nuclear weapons, South Korea will sue for peace. This is the KPA’s war plan: a vicious attack on Seoul and other major cities in order to force a termination of the conflict on North Korea’s terms.

The KPA knows that once massive U.S. reinforcements begin to pour into South Korea, the game will be nearly over. Hence, destroying a large part of Seoul and the South Korean leadership before the augmentation of U.S. forces reaches the peninsula is the critical goal.

The second side of this Rubik’s cube is the joint counteroffensive that will be mounted by better-trained and better-equipped South Korean forces and the U.S. Forces Korea, with rapid reinforcements that will spike up to nearly 700,000 U.S. ground, naval, and air force troops.³² Initially, flexible deterrence options lay out the amount of U.S. reinforcements that will be necessary to deter North Korean provocations as crisis escalates on the Korean Peninsula. If these efforts fail, preplanned time-phased force deployment data will trigger U.S.-ROK combined operations.³³

Together with the U.S. 7th Air Force, the ROK Air Force will mount a ferocious air campaign to take out advancing North Korean forces, destroying long-range artilleries and wreaking havoc deep into enemy lines. Unlike previous military doctrines that called for absorbing the first wave of attacks before mounting counterattacks, North Korea’s very probable use of WMD means that counterattacks must be launched almost simultaneously with a North Korean invasion. Attacking deeply, rapidly, and unrelentingly into the heartland of North Korea is the goal.

The North Korean air force has 810 fighters, but the majority are MiG-15s, MiG-17s, MiG-19s, and MiG-21s. Its most advanced fighter is the MiG-29, which entered service in the mid-1980s. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, “The obsolescence of the force has, in the last 15 years, prompted Pyongyang to engage in limited efforts to ameliorate this situation, including by introducing a modern automated air-defence C3I system, which provides overlapping coverage of the country, and developing the new Pongae-5 vertical-launched mobile SAM system and its associated radar.”³⁴ Until the advent of a progressive government in 2017, South Korea’s defense strategy was based on a triad: the so-called Kill Chain, or real-time responses to North Korean missile attacks, including possible preemptive strikes; the “Korea Air Missile Defense”; and the “Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation” strategy.

In South Korea’s 2016 Defense White Paper, it was noted that “the Kill Chain is an attack system comprising a series of steps, from the real-time detection of enemy missile threats and identifying the target locations to deciding on the most effective means of strike and launching the strike.”³⁵ Under the Moon government, the 2018 Defense White Paper significantly softened the urgency of the military threat from North Korea. The defense ministry shifted its focus from a North Korea threat–centric strategy to a “strategic targeting system” that takes into account “deterrence against omnidirectional asymmetrical threats and deterrence by denial.”³⁶

The 2018 Defense White Paper doesn’t state that North Korea itself is a threat to South Korea; it states that the ROK faces a range of asymmetrical threats from North Korea. As the Joongang Ilbo editorialized in January 2019, “the most recent white paper has watered down and made ambiguous the very concept of a main adversary for our military,” and “while North Korea’s denuclearization and improving South-North relations are key tasks, massive military threats including nuclear weapons and WMD from North Korea remain as critical threats.”³⁷

The politicization of South Korea’s threat perceptions and attendant military responses, as well as the Trump administration’s haphazard stance on the overarching North Korean threat, will have long-term consequences, such as weakening South Korea’s defense posture and ability to mount decisive counterattacks against North Korea in case of a major military conflict or selective North Korean military probes. In May 2019, when North Korea launched short-range missiles for the first time since 2017, Trump stated that “nobody’s happy about it, but we’re taking a good look.… The relationship continues, but we’ll see what happens. I know they want to negotiate, they’re talking about negotiating, but I don’t think they’re ready to negotiate.”³⁸ In South Korea, the Moon government was initially wary of calling out North Korea for its missile test, and the ministry of unification stated that it would continue to provide humanitarian assistance to North Korea regardless of the missile test.³⁹

The one area where the ROK has an advantage is in air superiority since it is augmented significantly by the U.S. 7th Air Force, stationed in South Korea. F-15Ks and F-16s constitute the bulk of South Korea’s combat aircraft, with forty F-35s that will be deployed in the early 2020s. Apart from the U.S. 7th Air Force, the U.S. 5th Air Force in Japan will be almost immediately involved in a major Korean conflict, as will the U.S. strategic bombers based in Guam.

The most problematic dimension of the Rubik’s cube is the third side: whether or not North Korea is going to use nuclear weapons if it’s pushed into a corner or if it believes that a preemptive nuclear strike on South Korea will enable it to reunify the peninsula on its own terms.

Michèle Flournoy, former U.S. deputy secretary of defense for policy, has stated that another Korean War “would be nothing like Iraq.… It’s not that the North Korean military is so good. It’s that North Korea has nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction—and is now in a situation where they might have real incentives to use them.”⁴⁰ This is the biggest strategic challenge confronting South Korea and the United States in the event of a second Korean War.

Unlike under the doctrine of mutually assured destruction that prevailed between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the current possibility of North Korea actually using nuclear weapons is much higher. There is no way to know short of an actual conflict if North Korea is going to push the nuclear button, but the strategic dividend from having deliverable nuclear weapons is huge. North Korea is deterred from launching another Korean War because U.S. involvement is virtually assured, with massive counterattacks. But every major military step South Korea and the United States take must now consider the horrors of a potential North Korean nuclear attack.

As important as this element is, what North Korea has achieved is quantitative superiority plus the added value of using WMD. According to The Diplomat, notwithstanding the superior military technology of the United States and South Korean forces compared to the KPA, “should a conflict break out, it is important to understand that this will not be a simple ‘shock and awe’ campaign ending with a bloody American victory, a leveled Pyongyang, and a chastised North Korea.”⁴¹

In the end, the ROK and the United States will prevail in another major conflict with North Korea. But technological dominance isn’t going to guarantee victory. The United States’ longest war, in Afghanistan, and the ongoing struggle in Iraq attest to how determined foes can wear down a technologically superior force.

The Quest for Nuclear Weapons

North Korea’s determination to pursue its own nuclear arsenal began in earnest in the late 1970s, just when South Korea’s own short-lived nuclear weapons program was discontinued under heavy pressure from the United States.

A combination of factors, including the withdrawal of the U.S. 7th Infantry Division in 1971, the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, and Jimmy Carter’s initial pledge to withdraw U.S. ground forces from the ROK, all contributed to a heightened sense of anxiety and abandonment in South Korea. President Park Chung-hee believed that only an independent nuclear arsenal would enable South Korea to have a self-reliant defense posture. Yet as domestic political turbulence mounted beginning in early 1978, Park was forced to give up his dreams of acquiring nuclear weapons. His assassination in October 1979 laid to rest Seoul’s aspirations to develop nuclear weapons, but even under Park, South Korea never went beyond the conceptual phase.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the rest of the world was more worried that South Korea and Taiwan wanted their own nuclear deterrents than about any nuclear ambitions North Korea might harbor. On July 9, 1982, the CIA issued a report on North Korea’s new nuclear research reactor at the Yongbyon nuclear center. The one-page assessment is heavily redacted but concludes that “the reactor, which will not be completed for several years, is not designed to provide the quantities of plutonium needed for a nuclear weapons program.”⁴³ That same month, the CIA issued National Intelligence Estimate 4-82, “Nuclear Proliferation Trends Through 1987.” It looked at the conflict between India and Pakistan and how security would be affected if Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons after New Delhi’s test of its “peaceful nuclear bomb” in 1974. Equally worrisome in the eyes of the CIA were South Korea and Taiwan: “US relations with South Korea and Taiwan will continue to be strained as both governments react to internal pressures to acquire sensitive nuclear fuel cycle facilities. Both will press the United States to help ensure their energy security, hoping for eventual US approval for their acquisition of such facilities.”⁴⁴ According to the report,

Both South Korea and Taiwan have provided assurances to the United States that they will not undertake nuclear weapons development—assurances dating from a period in the mid-1970s when the United States discovered evidence of dedicated programs to develop nuclear weapons. If US support remains strong over the next five years, lobbying for sensitive nuclear research in Seoul and Taipei is unlikely to move either government to renounce these assurances to the United States. Nevertheless, the governments are concerned that the constraints that the United States wishes to impose on their nuclear fuel cycle research threaten their future energy security.⁴⁵

By the late 1980s, U.S. intelligence began to focus much more on nuclear developments in North Korea. Throughout the 1980s, North Korea made significant progress in its missile program—begun in the 1970s by reverse-engineering Soviet short-range missiles. In August 1998, however, North Korea surprised the world by test-firing the Taepodong-1 medium-range missile with an estimated range of 2,000–5,000 kilometers. Pyongyang was inching toward what the United States considered to be a real red line: missiles that could hit the United States with nuclear warheads.

What triggered North Korea to place the highest priority on developing nuclear weapons? First and foremost, North Korea developed nuclear weapons in order to directly threaten the United States, not just its forces based in South Korea, Japan, and Guam. Kim Il Sung saw the technological advancement of the U.S. military and vowed that he would match it. As South Korea began to outpace North Korea economically, with commensurate improvements in defense, attaining an irreversible asymmetrical advantage was crucial.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact signaled to North Korea that it could no longer rely on Russia. China remained a critical ally, but Beijing’s policies also shifted after it embarked on unprecedented economic reforms in 1978. North Korea’s insistence that it had a sovereign right to develop nuclear weapons was, in some sense, a way of standing up against its patron.

After Kim Jong Un became Supreme Leader in December 2011, his primary goal was to accelerate North Korea’s nuclear weapons program—partly in order to fulfill the promise he had made to his father, but also to demonstrate his strategic acumen to his generals.

On November 28, 2017, North Korea successfully tested the Hwasong-15 ICBM, with a range of 8,500–13,000 kilometers and a road-mobile transporter erector launcher.⁴⁶ According to the 2018 Military Balance, North Korea now has at least six ICBMs (Hwasong-13, Hwasong-14 in test, and Hwasong-16 in test), an unknown number of intermediate-range ballistic missiles (Hwasong-12 in test), about ten medium-range ballistic missiles (Nodong, Scud-ER, and Hwasong-10), and some thirty short-range ballistic missiles (Hwasong-5).⁴⁷

What is so striking about North Korea’s nuclear program is that all measures failed to deter Pyongyang from crossing the nuclear threshold. Former South Korean presidents Kim Dae-jung’s and Roh Moo-hyun’s “sunshine policy” of overwhelming North Korea with incentives that would convince them not to develop or test nuclear weapons failed dismally. Sanctions and political pressures on North Korea were also unsuccessful in rolling back the country’s nuclear capabilities.

Importantly, intelligence estimates on North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capabilities have been behind the curve. South Korea’s progressive governments consistently downplayed North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. And despite overwhelming strategic intelligence assets, the United States also missed the rapid progress North Korea was making on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. According to David Sanger of the New York Times, when the Trump administration came into office in January 2017, it believed that there was “still ample time—upward of four years—to slow or stop its [North Korea’s] development of a missile capable of hitting an American city with a nuclear warhead.”48

In just over a quarter of a century—from September 1993, when North Korea threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), until September 2017, when it tested its first hydrogen bomb—North Korea had developed the ability to place a miniaturized warhead on an ICBM (see figure 7). That was what allowed Kim Jong Un to announce: “From April 21 [2018], North Korea will stop nuclear tests and launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles”—a statement that elicited praise from Moon and Trump for his “bold” decision.⁴⁹ Kim, who knows that North Korea has reached a level where additional tests will only result in marginal technical improvements but even more onerous international sanctions, has played his nuclear card beautifully.

For the past twenty-five years, the United States and South Korea, as well as China and Japan, have wrestled with one major dilemma: is any country willing to go to war with North Korea to prevent it from attaining nuclear weapons? The short answer was, and remains, no. So many red lines have been announced by the United States and South Korea since the early 1990s that they’ve become a red carpet.

Practically, this has meant that despite the heavy-handed rhetoric that “all options are on the table”—code for possible military options—the United States and certainly South Korea have not wanted to risk another Korean War if that was the alternative to living with a nuclearized North Korea. None of the joint statements, announcements, agreements, and accords that have been signed with North Korea since the early 1990s have succeeded in deterring or rolling back North Korea’s nuclear weapons ambition. Living with a nuclearized North Korea has been the strategic reality since Pyongyang’s first nuclear test in October 2006.

Over many years, the North Koreans have outmaneuvered several American presidents—Republicans and Democrats alike—with technological advances that seemed highly threatening but not worth the risk of a war that could kill millions in South Korea and Japan. A beefed-up military presence off the North Korean coast, cyberattacks, sabotage of imported parts, and simulated bombing runs may have slowed the country’s nuclear program but ultimately failed to stop it.

Many in the Pentagon see the failure to anticipate the North’s recent breakthroughs as an ominous reminder of how much could go wrong. A successful preemptive strike by the United States, for example, might require precise knowledge of the locations of manufacturing facilities, nuclear plants, and storage areas, plus the confidence that cyberstrikes and electronic strikes would cripple Kim’s ability to retaliate.⁵⁰

In the parlance of nuclear arms control, only five countries—the United States, China, Russia, Great Britain, and France—are recognized as “nuclear weapon states.” But these five, all permanent members of the UN Security Council, have contrasting views on a nuclearized North Korea. Two of them, China and Russia, are North Korea’s key supporters, and despite their official position on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, they’ve also gained dividends by pressuring the United States, South Korea, and Japan through North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

Regardless of whether the United States or other powers refuse to recognize North Korea as a nuclear weapon state, it comes down to semantics, since North Korea, like India, Pakistan, and Israel, is a nuclear power. Moreover, North Korea never had any intentions of giving up its nuclear arsenal. Contrary to the conventional wisdom among South Korea’s leftists, Kim Jong Un isn’t going to use it as a bargaining chip. The idea that North Korea will give up nuclear weapons in exchange for a security guarantee, normalization of relations with the United States, and other incentives such as massive foreign aid has been, and remains, a chimera.

A statement issued by the Institute for American Studies under North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on December 16, 2018, emphasized that “during the past six months since the Singapore DPRK-U.S. summit, the U.S. high-ranking politicians including the secretary of state have almost every day slandered the DPRK out of sheer malice, and the State Department and the Treasury Department have taken anti-DPRK sanctions measures.”51

From the outset of nuclear talks with the United States, North Korea has insisted on the term “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” and not “denuclearization of North Korea.” On December 20, 2018, KCNA released a commentary, under the pen name of Jong Hyun, that addressed what denuclearization meant to North Korea. It emphasized that “when we refer to the Korean peninsula, they include both the area of the DPRK and the area of south Korea where aggression troops including the nuclear weapons of the U.S. are deployed.”⁵²

This harks back to the 1991 South-North Joint Declaration on Denuclearization, which stated that “South and North Korea agree not to test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy, or use nuclear weapons; to use nuclear energy solely for peaceful purposes; and not to possess facilities for nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment.”⁵³ Importantly, this is the only document where the two Koreas made an explicit promise not to develop, deploy, or use nuclear weapons, but in all other statements released since that time, the term “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” has been used as a catchall phrase. The KNCA commentary went on to say:

The United States must now recognize the accurate meaning of the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and especially, must study geography.… When we talk about the Korean Peninsula, it includes the territory of our republic and also the entire region of [South Korea] where the United States has placed its invasive force, including nuclear weapons. When we talk about the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, it means the removal of all sources of nuclear threat, not only from the South and North but also from areas neighboring the Korean Peninsula.⁵⁴

The nebulous term “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” has been used to paper over fundamentally different concepts of denuclearization. Not once has North Korea ever agreed to CVID, or the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear weapons, although this remains the key goal of the United States, Japan, and to a lesser degree South Korea. For the Moon government, political factors make the creation of an irreversible peace regime on the Korean Peninsula much more important than achieving CVID, although it continues to pay lip service to the goal of dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program. Under Trump, CVID has been renamed FFVD, or the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

The focus on unilateral peace by the Moon administration is dangerous because it equates North Korean commitments to denuclearization with tangible and verifiable progress toward CVID. In a September 2018 address, Moon stated that “the two Koreas agreed to a mutual cessation of hostilities on the entire Korean Peninsula. This is akin to a declaration to end the Korean War as it substantially eliminates the danger of war. Efforts will be made to demilitarize the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone and the Joint Security Area and transform them into a symbol of peace. These are important strides towards the realization of a Korean Peninsula free from war.”⁵⁵

Alluding to ongoing steps to reduce tensions, he noted that South Korea and the United States have responded positively to the actions taken by North Korea. “Our two countries stopped large-scale joint military exercises involving the deployment of strategic assets. I expect there will be significant progress in denuclearization if the leaders of North Korea and the United States sit down together again.”⁵⁶ However, the lack of a viable North Korea policy under the Trump administration coupled with Trump’s penchant for the limelight and personal diplomacy has resulted in vastly different perceptions in the United States and North Korea of what was agreed to in the June 2018 Singapore summit. This became very apparent in Hanoi in February 2019 when Trump showed Kim a list of North Korean nuclear facilities that had to be dismantled if the talks were to go forward. Neither Kim nor Trump was willing to make key concessions, and the second summit was abruptly terminated.

While Trump continues to hope for a groundbreaking nuclear deal with Kim Jong Un, it is critical to understand the deep gulf that persists between the United States and North Korea over denuclearization. Despite Moon’s—or, for that matter, Trump’s—hopes, North Korea won’t give up nuclear weapons or other WMD. This is the new strategic reality that deserves undivided attention even if Trump and Kim ultimately agree on a tenuous nuclear accord for political expediency.