Given advancements in its missile technology, North Korea can hit South Korea, Japan, and even potentially the United States with nuclear weapons and has threatened to do so on multiple occasions.
Kim or a successor may use nuclear weapons as a last-ditch effort to deter outside intervention that could ensure and accelerate the collapse of the regime. One big problem is that U. The conventional wisdom is that Chinese intervention would largely be limited to dealing with refugees along its border, and any actions taken would be in support of North Korea.
But changes in Chinese military capabilities, heightened concerns about nuclear security, and prioritization of geopolitical competition with the United States have encouraged China to broaden its thinking in recent years. Specifically, China would likely undertake an extensive military intervention with an eye on expanding regional influence if a major conflict broke out on the Korean Peninsula.
Recent Chinese statements and military training exercises also point to heightened preparations for intervention. Moreover, it is likely that the Chinese military would reach North Korean nuclear facilities sooner than U.
China might also enjoy early warning, allowing for advanced preparation, because the shared border provides China with unique opportunities to collect intelligence. All of this points to the need for the United States to change its planning assumptions to account for the presence of Chinese troops on the peninsula following any credible signs of instability in Pyongyang.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of the U. Unlike China, the United States is not a resident Asian power; it relies on a network of alliance relationships for military access.
The unpredictability of U. Similarly, if the United States does not follow through completely on its alliance commitments to South Korea, this could encourage allies to pursue alternative arrangements and seek greater accommodation of China, weakening the U. Hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed for stability and WMD elimination operations in North Korea.
Such a war would then likely involve deaths in the order of tens of thousands of people, even millions , and the choice to detonate any U. The drain of a major war on the Korean Peninsula would be cataclysmic for U. In short, while many may cheer at the sign of political troubles in North Korea, the situation is complicated.
Surely its vast economic and technological advantages along with a much larger population enable Seoul to at least take over its conventional defense. If the DPRK refuses to negotiate seriously over its nuclear status, it might even make sense for South Korea to develop a countervailing arsenal.
Washington cannot force the Kim regime to negotiate. Western officials often cannot understand why Pyongyang does what it does. The problem is not that Kim or his minions are crazy. Indeed, most people only see through a glass into the North. Nevertheless, the United States has no choice but to remain ready to engage the North.
The Rand Corporation and Asan Institute warn that Pyongyang could have two hundred nuclear weapons before the decade is out.
After China intervened in the Korean War, Gen. There is no reason to expect that to change along with the advent of the Biden presidency. The goals were to figure out the best ways to detect an attack, identify what substance had been used, limit the spread of the virus, and then rush vaccines and other medical care to the infected to save as many lives as possible.
US bases in South Korea received new environmental surveillance systems designed to quickly detect the presence of a biological agent. Still, Weber said his main takeaway was the near impossibility of preventing biological weapons from killing an astonishing number of people.
In some cases, it was significantly higher because the infection spread to Japan or other nearby countries. North Korea is thought to have about 50 nukes. The US, by contrast, has an astonishing 6, nuclear weapons surpassed only by Russia, which has an estimated 7, weapons.
Trump — or one of his successors — could respond to a North Korean nuclear strike by destroying every major North Korean city in a matter of hours. Experts inside and outside the US government who study North Korea say that Kim is a rational leader with a singular focus on maintaining control of his country.
And for a long time, they believed that Kim would only use his nuclear weapons if he were facing military defeat and the imminent collapse of his government. It would be the last gasp of a dying regime, one determined to kill as many of its enemies as possible before the end came.
Those assessments have now changed. Most of the experts I spoke to believe North Korea would use nuclear weapons at the beginning of a war — not at the end. And most of them believe Kim would be making a rational decision, not a crazy or suicidal one, if he gave the launch order.
He remembers that the walls were covered with graffiti praising Kim. He knows that any US and South Korean strike would be designed to destroy or capture his nuclear weapons. In the s, the Soviet Union was much stronger militarily than Germany, France, or the other countries of Western Europe. The US had formally committed to protecting those nations from a Soviet invasion, and Bennett told me that American military planners were prepared to use small-scale tactical nuclear weapons against the advancing Russian troops to stop the assault.
That entire calculus began to change once the Soviet Union developed long-range nuclear missiles capable of reaching the continental US. European leaders openly wondered how far Washington would be willing to go to protect their countries from the Soviet Union given the new risks to the American homeland.
If the US were no longer willing to defend Seoul, then South Korea — which has no nuclear weapons of its own — would be a lot easier to invade and defeat. But how do you break up that alliance? Being able to credibly threaten to destroy New York or Washington definitely helps.
North Korea has missiles capable of reaching the West Coast and is thought to have nuclear warheads that would fit on top of them. They could destroy a major nuclear city. If Kim decides the answer is no, using a nuclear weapon against South Korea no longer seems crazy or suicidal. It starts to seem rational.
And one particular South Korean city starts to seem like the likeliest target. That was widely seen as an implicit threat to use nuclear weapons against the South Korean port city of Busan, which would play a vital role in any Pentagon effort to build a force big enough to defend the South or to lead a preemptive strike on the North.
The US currently has around 28, troops stationed in South Korea and would need to deploy hundreds of thousands more if war broke out with the North. The US would also have to send in thousands of additional tanks, armored personnel carriers, bombers, fighter jets, helicopters, and artillery pieces. But the panelists agreed that denuclearization talks with Pyongyang are already surfacing the issue. Order from Chaos. A how-to guide for managing the end of the post-Cold War era.
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