Four days to Doomsday,
It sounds like the plot of a disaster movie, but experts say a confrontation between China and the U.S. over North and South Korea could take just days to develop into nuclear winter. MICHAEL SHERIDAN imagines how it could happen.
The time on the Doomsday clock is five minutes to midnight, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the clock in 1947. But nowhere is it closer to doomsday than on the Korean Peninsula, where two nuclear-armed enemies — North Korea and the United States, with its South Korean ally — face each other across the tense Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
Testing a bomb, firing missiles, hurling bloody rhetoric, launching cyber-attacks: North Korea has done it all in recent months. In early March, it withdrew from the armistice that ended the Korean War 60 years ago. In reaction, the U.S. is bolstering its anti-missile defences.
Are North Korea’s threats real or just for show? Could it all go wrong and lead to nuclear war? Yes, say those who are paid to examine armegeddon scenarios, and this is how it could happen in four short days (the following scenario is fiction but it’s based on fact).
DAY 1
North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong-un, 29, visits an army unit on Wolnae Islet off his west coast. The soldiers are training to storm the South Korean island of Baeknyeong 10 kilometres away. He exhorts them to “steel their hearts.”
On the way back to the capital, Pyongyang, army chief Choe Ryonghae and defence minister Kim Kyoksik warn the young Kim that people think he is weak. They defy him to prove them wrong. The three decide on a calculated act of aggression to show that the plump trainee dictator is the real thing.
DAY 2
North Korean artillery opens up on Baeknyeong island. Under a curtain of shellfire, North Korean speedboats race across the West Sea. Black-clad special forces leap ashore screaming slogans, massacring the small garrison of South Korean conscripts. The red banner flies over Baeknyeong.
In Seoul, South Korean President Park Geun-hye, a conservative, agrees with her generals they must hit back. Park’s mother was murdered by a North Korean assassin. Her father, who ruled as a military dictator in the ’60s and ’70s, was shot to death by his own spy chief. The South Koreans have an iron lady in command.
They send F-15 fighter bombers of the 102nd Squadron and F-16 fighters of the 161st Squadron to strike deep into North Korea. Two reserve tank bases and military tunnel networks are left in ruins. No planes are lost. Enraged, the North Korean generals give Kim an ultimatum: fight now or face a coup. The Chinese ambassador to Pyongyang tries to call on Kim but is refused an audience.
As night falls in Beijing, Xi Jinping, China’s new leader, calls President Barack Obama, warning him to stay out of it. Xi reminds him that China is North Korea’s ally. On the telephone Obama is noncommittal. Afterwards he turns to his security “principals” for urgent advice.
Secretary of defence Chuck Hagel and secretary of state John Kerry, both Vietnam veterans, hate the thought of war. National security adviser Tom Donilon tries to finesse the options. The message China gets: the Americans are dithering.
There is no hesitation in Tokyo, though, where the cabinet convenes a crisis meeting with Japan’s SelfDefence Forces. A black limousine conveys the nationalist prime minister Shinzo Abe to the Imperial Palace late that night.
DAY 3
Asia awakes to the news that Japan has suspended Article 9 of its 1947 constitution, the clause renouncing the use of war.
In the morning rush hour, a salvo of North Korean rockets and shells slams into the posh suburb of Gangnam in the South Korean capital of Seoul, 50 km from the DMZ. Hundreds die.
The South Koreans scramble their F-15 Slam Eagles. Copying an Israeli plan, they target party buildings in Pyongyang and a giant statue of Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea.
By lunchtime the South Korean and Japanese stock markets have collapsed, oil is $250 a barrel and gold soars to $2,500 an ounce.
South Korea orders all nuclear reactors to be shut down and secured. Foreign nationals mob the air and sea ports to get out.
A cyberattack traced to Shandong, in eastern China, shuts down the South Korean air traffic control system and blocks some reactor controls. South Korea’s nerds, however, can out-geek the Chinese any day. The world’s most wired society is soon online again.
At the White House, an aide comes in to see Donilon with the news that former president Bill Clinton, who has been to North Korea, is offering to use his famous charm on Kim. Donilon rolls his eyes.
Obama tries to phone Kim, remembering that basketball icon Dennis Rodman, who has just been to North Korea, said Kim just wanted a call. Obama can’t get through.
When it comes to Pyongyang, there are no back channels to warn Kim of impending disaster as events get out of his control.
Mid-afternoon sees Aegis-class destroyers and frigates of the Japanese navy at sea off North Korea. It is an exercise they have done before. Their orders are to shoot down any missiles heading for Japan. Chinese state TV and radio break into scheduled programs to broadcast a hardline statement warning Japan off.
As mobs take to the streets in Chinese cities, Obama places a call to Xi, who gives permission for an airlift of 120,000 Japanese citizens out of China. Hotel rooms in Hong Kong and Taipei fetch $1,000 a night.
In a Skype call, the Swedish ambassador in Pyongyang tells his ministry in Stockholm that he sees tanks and rocket-launchers in the streets. Then North Korean TV goes off the air. All communications are cut.
Locked in a White House crisis meeting, Obama calls the leaders of China, Japan, Russia, France and Britain.
At sunset, a train carrying the ambassadors of Russia, Iran and Syria crosses the metal girder bridge from North Korea to the Chinese city of Dandong.
The U.S. finally goes on alert. Planes roar off the carrier USS George Washington in the Sea of Japan and 28,500 American troops line up with their exhausted South Korean allies at the DMZ.
In the darkness, new U.S. X-band radars in Taiwan and Japan detect dozens of Chinese warplanes patrolling the eastern seaboard of China. All civilian air traffic in northeast Asia ceases. The evacuation flights of the Japanese are grounded, stranding 87,000 in hostile land.
In Beijing, the stocky Xi collapses during a late-night meeting of the supreme seven-man standing committee of the Politburo. His blood pressure is 180/120 — a hypertensive emergency. The meeting goes on with Zhang Dejiang, an economist trained in North Korea, taking the lead in the discussion.
DAY 4
In the early hours, China’s retired “security czar” Zhou Yongkang is awakened at his luxurious Beijing villa. A black Audi takes him to the Politburo, where a red telephone sits on a desk. Would he please try to call Kim? Zhou obliges. He gets the North Korean secret police chief. They chat about old times but, sorry, Kim is busy.
In South Korea, President Park is asleep. Before going to bed she authorized all necessary defences and took a sleeping pill. But Kim is on amphetamines and gets in first: he gives the order for the all-out bombardment of Seoul. At dawn, 5,000 guns fire from emplacements hidden for decades in tunnels and pits.
Kim has miscalculated — again. Damage is heavy but casualties are light because most civilians are spending the night in shelters. The Americans and South Koreans pour back a barrage of fire.
North Korean tanks and suicide squads charge across barbed wire and mines at the DMZ. They are wiped out. The Kim dynasty, set up with Stalin’s support, is tottering.
In Pyongyang, Kim’s uncle and mentor, Jang Song-thaek, shoots himself with a bodyguard’s pistol. Kim hears the shot down the corridor of his bunker: his generals confront him.
Russian eavesdroppers pick up a one-word command on a tapped copper telephone cable from the bunker beneath Kim Il-sung’s mausoleum. The bug was planted by the KGB in the 1970s. Amazingly, it still works. Three minutes later, President Vladimir Putin calls Obama on the hotline. He warns of imminent catastrophe. Voice steely, Putin pledges that “Russia, with our long Christian heritage, will never put civilization in peril.”
Obama addresses the nation from the Oval Office, saying America’s national interests are at stake. While he speaks, the White House tries to call Xi, but a voice at the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing says Xi is not available. The world has not yet heard of his collapse.
Analysts at the U.S. National Security Agency detect a flash at North Korea’s “civilian satellite” launch pad on the remote northeast coast. One minute and 16 seconds later a flash and a mushroom cloud are seen over the Yongsan district of Seoul, where the giant U.S. military headquarters — with its extensive housing and schools for the families of service personnel — has been since the 1950s.
In the White House situation room all eyes are on Obama. He ...
So, is it really five minutes to midnight? A few weeks ago, Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. secretary of state, told David Ignatius of The Washington Post that “there is now a real danger of an accident, incident or miscalculation on the Korean Peninsula.” Is America prepared? No. As in the fictional scenario, the Americans seem to be vaguely hoping that the Chinese will do something about it.
Kissinger, who led the U.S. opening to China in the ’70s, thinks Donilon must forge a plan with Beijing about what to do in such a crisis.
The CIA and the Chinese ministry of state security are short on facts that they’ll reveal to the public or to each other. In recent weeks South Korean intelligence briefings to lawmakers, which inevitably leak, have sown confusion about what the South knows. So here are a few facts. The North Koreans have a bomb. Eleven years ago, a western intelligence officer, a physicist, sat in a smoke-filled bar in Seoul and explained in detail why he thought the North Koreans could probably do it.
In 2006, they invited Siegfried Hecker, a top American nuclear weapons scientist, to hold a piece of their plutonium, the vital ingredient of a small bomb. It was heavy and slightly warm. “I held the plutonium and it passed the test,” Hecker said later.
The director of the Yongbyon nuclear research reactor had told him it was “good bomb-grade plutonium,” he added.
Jeffrey Park, of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, says that on Feb. 12 of this year — barely five weeks ago — a seismological station in Mudanjiang, China, had picked up a telltale seismic “P wave” shock of 5.1 magnitude, indicating a man-made explosion underground. It was North Korea’s third nuclear test.
“The yield of the 2013 test was more than three times larger than the yield of the 2009 test and more than 15 times larger than the yield of the 2006 test,” Park writes in the bulletin, which was founded by former members of the original Manhattan atomic bomb project to warn of the nuclear threat to humanity.
So Kim is building a better bomb. North Korea called the Feb. 12 device “small and powerful.” It also tested a new long-range ballistic missile Dec. 12.
As Kim knows, America’s first atomic bombs were so big that they needed a giant aircraft, the B-29, to carry them. There is no chance that a vintage North Korean bomber could make it past the world’s most sophisticated air defences around Seoul. But a missile might.
The claim could be a bluff. “Miniaturizing” a device is incredibly difficult. America’s Manhattan project almost failed until it called on a Russian genius to cast the precision explosives around the plutonium core that turned the Nagasaki bomb from a big bang into an atomic flash.
Today’s missile warheads require machining to micro-tolerances that the North Koreans may not achieve.
“If this is proven,” writes Victor Cha, who was point man for Korea on George W. Bush’s National Security Council and is now at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, “then they will have crossed another technological threshold.”
Bluffing can be lethal. “Saddam Hussein showed the world how easy it can be for a secretive government to persuade world leaders ... that it possesses weapons of mass destruction,” Park observes.
Yet ambiguity is also a weapon in Kim’s arsenal — and, as Iraq showed, it poses a dilemma for his foes.
The bad news, say critics of the Obama administration, is that North Korea is a blueprint for American failure that sets a terrible precedent for Iran, which says its atoms are for peace but won’t let the world see what it has. The good news is the North Koreans seem rational and are vulnerable to Chinese pressure.
The White House has seized on recent statements by party officials in Beijing suggesting that China might dump its ally of 60 years.
“You’re starting to see them recalculate and say, ‘ You know what? This is starting to get out of hand,’” Obama said last week.
Maybe. Although China signed up to United Nations sanctions, they are not rigidly enforced. Trucks and trains rumble across the iron bridge at Dandong night and day with scant customs checks. China supplies 80 per cent of North Korea’s energy and 45 per cent of its food.
China’s new boss Xi (who, as far as we know, is a healthy 59-yearold with no blood pressure problems) may have the power to change course. It hasn’t happened yet.
Chinese leaders deeply fear a reunited, capitalist, democratic Korea, allied to the U.S., on their border.
What do the North Koreans want themselves?
“Under no circumstances will North Korea under the leadership of the Kim family relinquish its nuclear weapons — and this family might stay in control for decades,” says Andrei Lankov, a rumpled Russian academic who studied at Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang.
The North Koreans look at Saddam and Muammar Gadaffi as examples of why they are right, he says. The nukes are a deterrent, a diplomatic tool and a propaganda asset. What’s to trade?
Lankov argues that Pyongyang’s denuclearization is a dream and the best that can be hoped for is a negotiated settlement under which North Korea’s existing weapons would be safeguarded and it would not build any more.
So, it seems the fate of a reclusive Asian dictatorship is linked to the fate of us all.
“We should be ready for trouble,” Lankov warned in a prescient paper last autumn. “A reforming North Korea will likely be very unstable and might collapse. Worse still, collapse is likely to come with little to no warning. Among other things, it may provoke unnecessary confrontation between America and China.”