Authors: James Barrington
The Taep’o-dong 2 missile sitting on the launch pad at Ok’pyong had taken the
North Koreans almost a year to prepare.
Like its predecessor, the Taep’o-dong 1, its first two stages were liquid-fuelled, but the
third stage was powered by a solid-fuel motor. That also contained the payload, and designing that was what had taken the most time. The device sitting at the top of the forty-six-metre-high
ballistic missile was special in every way, and designed for a single purpose. As far as the North Korean scientists were aware, it was the first, and quite probably the last, such
‘warhead’ ever constructed.
Alongside the launch pad a servicing gantry had been erected, and white-coated technicians
swarmed over it, checking that everything was properly secured and ready for the launch. The final procedure, before the countdown began, was to load the fuel tanks of the first two stages,
and for that manoeuvre everybody left the pad apart from the fire crews and a mere handful of other essential personnel.
Four hours later, the Taep’o-dong 2 sat ready. The pad was now deserted apart from the
armed guards posted to ensure nobody approached it, and the countdown began in a blast-proof concrete bunker half a mile from the site.
Pak Je-San gazed around the hangar with some small satisfaction. The maintainers had by now
got two of the unserviceable Foxbats into flying condition, which was a better result than he’d secretly hoped. He now had seven MiG-25s operational here at T’ae’tan and
twenty-two in total, including the aircraft he’d dispersed to the other three airfields.
Even better news was that the forty-eight R-40T missiles his agents had stolen from Dobric had
arrived the previous day at the port of Bandar Abbas in Iran, and would be flown from there direct to T’ae’tan. They were scheduled to arrive within hours, before being
distributed to the other airfields. That would give them a combined arsenal of over
one hundred and sixty missiles and that, Pak Je-San felt confident, was
more than enough. If they then ran out of munitions, the war would already be lost.
‘Not exactly a surprise, then?’
‘No, Mr President,’ agreed the Secretary of Defense, walking across the Oval Office
and placing a sheaf of papers on the supreme commander’s mahogany desk. He’d just flown back from an emergency session of the United Nations’ Security Council in New York.
The President had known the Secretary of Defense for years and trusted his judgement more than almost anyone else in his own administration.
‘What did they say, exactly?’
‘Just what the CIA expected. That all the manoeuvres the NKs are currently carrying out
are part of this exercise they claim to be running.’
The President leant back in his seat and steepled his fingers, then abruptly sat forward again.
‘Are we reading more into this than we should? Could it really be just a routine exercise?’
The Secretary of Defense shook his head decisively. ‘I suppose there’s about a one
per cent chance that we’re mistaken, but I believe the evidence is unambiguous. North Korea is gearing up for a push south across the DMZ.’
‘I’ve been briefed by the Joint Chiefs already, but what’s
your
take on this? If the Agency
is
right, what can we do to stop them? Do we have
enough forces in South Korea to counter an outright invasion?’
The Secretary of Defense shook his head. ‘There’s no way of stopping a North Korean
advance, because they outnumber the South in armour, battlefield artillery and also men. That’s always been acknowledged as a virtual certainty. What they lack is support and supply
chains in depth, so they could certainly get their forces some way into South Korea, but they wouldn’t be able to sustain their advance or consolidate their positions, and eventually
we’d be able to push them back across the DMZ. The one-liner here is that the North Koreans can start a war, but they can’t finish one.’
‘I don’t want them to
start
a war. We’ve got enough problems in the Middle East as it is.’
‘If they did cross the DMZ it would give us the excuse we need to take out the
leadership in Pyongyang.’
The President shook his head. ‘I know, but the timing’s not right and we’re
stretched thinly enough as it is. Right, let’s review the evidence that the North Koreans are planning something.’
‘I do believe it’s convincing, Mr President. The satellite imagery shows definite
manoeuvres by their troops, and the Eighth Army is now operating several Shadow 200 unmanned aerial vehicles over the DMZ. They fly at between ten and fourteen thousand feet and they’re
pretty much invisible at that altitude. They’ve now been redeployed to cover areas further north and the data they’ve collected support the satellite pictures. We’ve also
flown them over the nuclear plant at Yongbyon and other sensitive sites, and we’ve been using Guardrail Common Sensor systems close to the DMZ.’
‘Guardrail?’
‘It’s an airborne communications and signals intelligence system – COMINT
and SIGINT – developed by the NSA, and it’s recorded a marked increase in radio and signal traffic in the area. Now, none of this conclusively proves that the North Koreans are
planning an invasion, but collectively it certainly suggests they’re planning
something
.
‘As you know, sir, we’ve normally no direct contact with Pyongyang, so we’ve
used the strongest diplomatic language we could at the UN, and told them we’d retaliate if any of their troops moved across the DMZ. We just got a bunch of blank stares from the
delegation and a repeat of the
It’s all an exercise
bullshit. They said if their troops did cross into or through the DMZ it
would only be because of navigation errors in the heat of the exercise, and therefore they urged that no retaliation be considered.’
‘Great,’ the President muttered. ‘So now they want us to sit back and do
nothing while they head straight for Seoul. Well, we’re not going to do that. You clearly told them we’d be prepared to use all our military assets, including missiles, to defend
our allies?’
‘Yes, and they insisted it was just an exercise. And then warned that any attack by us or
South Korea would be vigorously repulsed.’
The President stood up and paced back and forth behind his huge desk for a minute or so. He
sometimes found that walking helped clarity of thought.
‘Let me just summarize the information I’ve already been given. The North Koreans
could invade the South and there wouldn’t be a hell of a lot we could do to stop them. But they don’t have the resources to consolidate their advance, and we’d be able to
land enough troops and armour to drive them back within a few weeks. Is that a fair assessment?’
‘Yes, Mr President.’
‘And presumably they know this as well as we do?’
‘I can’t speak for the leadership in Pyongyang, but I think their senior military
officers will be aware of the limitations in their supply system, yes.’
‘So let me ask the obvious question. Why would they do it? Why would North Korea consider
mounting an invasion that they know must ultimately fail? What’s their objective? And would they use nuclear weapons to achieve it?’
The Secretary of Defense, faced with not one but four ‘obvious questions’, guessed
that the one the President really wanted an answer to was the last of them.
‘Frankly, Mr President, I’m not convinced, for several reasons. We know the North
Koreans have developed nuclear weapons, because of the underground test they carried out in the fall of 2006. But detonating a small atomic device in some kind of test rig isn’t the
same as bolting one to a bus on the top of a missile and dropping a cone over it. The miniaturization process is difficult and complicated, and I still think it’s beyond the North
Koreans’ technical competence. The CIA believes they’ve been in contact with Iranian scientists, but it’s not clear who’s advising who, and I still say it’s
significant that neither nation has so far demonstrated that they have a long-range nuclear delivery capability.’
‘But you do accept that they possess the raw material to manufacture nuclear
weapons?’
The Secretary of Defense nodded. ‘Yes, obviously. All our analyses suggest that the
Yongbyon reprocessing plant has been producing weapons-grade fissionable material for some time. We don’t know how
much they have, but the IAEA
calculated a maximum of about thirty-five kilograms. A twenty-kiloton weapon needs eight kilograms of plutonium, so that suggests they could have manufactured four fairly low-yield devices at
the most. They obviously used some of it for the Hamgyeong province tests, so our best guess is they’ve got no more than three functioning devices, and that’s not enough to make a
credible threat against South Korea – or anywhere else, for that matter.’
The President sat down again. ‘I hear what you say, and I don’t disagree with your
conclusions, but the facts remain. North Korea appears to be planning an incursion across the border. Unless the leadership in Pyongyang has completely flipped, they must have a good reason
for doing it, and also be confident they can get away with it. So we’ll work on that premise. First, let’s call the roll. What have we got in South Korea right now?’
The Secretary of Defense settled back in his chair. ‘Militarily, the two countries are
unevenly matched in almost every sector.’ And he outlined the discrepancies in their inventories. ‘You should also be aware, sir, that defeating North Korea by military means, if
it comes to that, is not going to be an easy option. Before you make any decisions, you need to be fully informed of the likely consequences.
‘The public perception is that North Korea is a grindingly poor country with a starving
and dissatisfied population ruled by two psychopaths, one of them now dead.’
This is literally true. Kim Il Sung – the ‘Eternal Leader’ – died in
1994 but is still the official ruler and has, since his death, made no decisions worse than he did during his live tenure. The functional head of state is the ‘Dear Leader’, his
son. This scenario led the CIA to describe North Korea’s system of government as the ‘CFC Gambit’ – the acronym standing for ‘crippled, fearsome and
crazy’.
‘The reality,’ the Secretary of Defense went on, ‘is somewhat different. The
nation
is
a poor country by Western standards, but the vast majority of the people are unswervingly loyal to their leader, and would
happily fight to defend him and their homeland. He almost certainly
is
a psychopath, and he’s definitely deluded – he
claimed not long ago that he’d shot five holes-in-one during a single round of golf, which would make anyone who’s ever picked up a golf club doubt his sanity.’
The President laughed briefly.
‘More seriously, the country’s been in a state of siege ever since the
nineteen-fifties, and the bulk of their GNP is spent annually on preparations for war. And, by any standards, they are very well prepared for conflict.
‘Just to give you a few examples: most of their fighter and bomber aircraft aren’t
kept in hangars the way ours are. The North Koreans excavate deep into the northern slopes of the mountains, which are mainly granite, and there create huge underground spaces for their
aircraft. They choose the north side because our bombs or missiles would have to be dropped or fired from the south, so the bulk of the mountain would be in the way. The rock above the
tunnelled-out hangars is far too thick for bunker-busting bombs to penetrate. To be specific, our GBU-28 can cut through twenty feet of reinforced concrete: most of the North Korean bunkers
are protected by around two hundred sixty feet of granite.
‘According to the latest estimate, North Korea has well over eight thousand individual
underground sites linked by three hundred fifty miles of tunnels. That’s enough to shelter most of their air force from any attack we could launch using conventional weapons.
There’s also nothing we could do to cut their lines of communication or to try to decimate their military command structure, because they’re underground as well. One report
suggested that their bunkers hold over a million tons of food, one and a half million tons of fuel and nearly two million tons of ammunition and stores. In short, we could launch a massive
bombardment of all known North Korean military facilities and achieve virtually nothing in terms of affecting their ability to wage war.
‘Defeating the Iraqis was easy: they had low morale and faced overwhelming odds. The
battles took place on almost ideal terrain for our forces – wide open deserts – and we achieved virtually immediate air superiority. North Korea, however, is mountainous, and even
if we did gain control of the skies – which is by no means certain – that probably wouldn’t help much. The battles there will be won or lost on the ground.
‘I mentioned their superiority in numbers of tanks. The North Koreans not only have more
tanks than our combined forces can field, but most analysts believe they’re better vehicles as well. They’re faster, with
thicker armour and
more powerful main guns. They’ve also developed tanks specifically for fighting in the hills and valleys of their country. They’re designed to manage better on steep slopes, and
they can ford the deepest rivers.
‘And that’s just one way in which the North Koreans have prepared for a war that
they’re actually expecting to fight. They’ve also got the biggest special force in the world – about one hundred twenty thousand men. They’ve got twelve thousand
anti-aircraft guns, fifteen thousand shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, and about seven hundred high-speed patrol boats, most carrying surface-to-surface missiles, plus long-range
anti-ship missiles.
‘Their fighter aircraft are mainly old and slow, but North Korea’s a very small
country, and any air battles will be more like Second World War dogfights than the kind of combat our pilots are generally trained for. There just won’t be the opportunities for our
guys to engage targets at long and medium range, because the North Korean aircraft will pop up from behind a mountain, fire a salvo and drop down again. The air war will be messy and fought
at very close quarters, which is exactly how their pilots have been trained to fight.
‘The last point to remember is probably the most important: North Korea
expects
to fight a war. South Korea is seen as enemy territory, but is also regarded as merely a client state of America, and therefore of little
real importance. America itself is and always has been North Korea’s main enemy, so their leadership believes that the war will ultimately be a contest between these two countries.
Pyongyang does not expect China or Russia or anyone else to intercede on its behalf, or to offer any kind of assistance, and all its preparations are directed towards a fight to the death
between them and us. If we attempt to invade them, Pyongyang will respond with all the forces at its disposal, including whatever weapons of mass destruction its scientists have been able to
fabricate. It will do its very best to destroy the United States and kill as many of our citizens as possible.
That
is their
leader’s philosophy, and
that
’s what really scares me.’
‘You’ve done a pretty good job of scaring me too,’ the President said.
‘So what response do you suggest?’
‘As you know, Mr President, we’re committed to developing a
defence shield between the two Koreas, and we’ve allocated an eleven-billion-dollar budget to achieve that. The problem is that we’ve done almost nothing so far.
We’ve withdrawn a lot of our troops from the area immediately south of the DMZ simply to reduce possible tension. And we’re also in the process of upgrading the Patriot missile
systems we’ve positioned there from PAC-2 to PAC-3, but that’s about all.
‘What we can’t now do is reinforce our troops there very quickly, because of the
logistics involved. This situation has blown up really quickly. The Joint Chiefs anticipate it will take a minimum of a week to assemble the men and supplies we’d need, and probably
another week to ship them to the peninsula. If the invasion starts within the next few days, South Korea simply won’t have the ability to stop the advancing troops. The South can slow
them up, but ultimately the North will just roll over the defenders.