At war with North Korea
Canada has more at stake on the Korean Peninsula than many seem to think, writes PAUL H. CHAPIN.
Last month, the regime in Pyongyang renounced the ceasefire which concluded the Korean War in 1953. “From this moment,” the regime declared, “north-south relations will be placed on a state of war, and all issues arising between the north and the south will be dealt with according to the rules of wartime.” If North Korea declares it is back in a “state of war,” there is no getting around the fact that we are back in a “state of war” with North Korea.
Pyongyang’s announcement does not mean that a renewal of hostilities is inevitable. But it does mean that North Korea no longer considers itself bound by the 63 paragraphs of the 1953 armistice agreement outlining rules to prevent the renewal of hostilities. Since the “final peace settlement” which was supposed to follow never materialized, the armistice agreement is/was the only agreement in place governing relations on the Korean continent.
None of this is good news. North Korea has a long and tedious history of jerking the West’s chain, and one could be excused for dismissing the latest developments as nothing more than an escalation of the hysterics expected out of Pyongyang. But the latest development does raise questions for which old explanations no longer provide adequate answers. Why now? What might the North Koreans actually try to do? And how would the West respond after Iraq, Afghanistan and all the rest? Here’s a best first guess. It’s mostly about politics in North Korea and a new leader trying to make his mark. Kim Jongun is the third dictator in a row from the same family. But he’s only 30 years old, he’s never held any public position before that anyone knows of, and he gained power only a couple of years ago. The little that’s known about him suggests he got there because he’s ruthless and got help from a wellplaced aunt and uncle. Kim was not the natural successor. His mother was not his father’s first or only wife. So he faced plenty of competition within the family including his father’s younger halfbrother, several half-brothers of his own, a reportedly very smart half-sister, and his own elder brother.
Local wisdom has it that Kim appealed to his father because of his “ferocious” nature. The old man wasn’t wrong. Not only did Kim dispose of the family competition for the top job, but in the last two years he’s made sure he kept it through an extensive Stalin-style purge of civilian and military opponents.
The “big project” for Kim is the one which eluded his father and grandfather, reunification of Korea under Pyongyang. It is an impossible dream for any but the most delusional. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea can barely keep the lights on, its population lives in poverty and depends on international handouts, and a monstrous system of work camps imprisons, tortures and disposes of political dissenters. Much as in Stalinist Russia, the only things that “work” are the ruling party and the military. In contrast, the Republic of Korea is an economic powerhouse, the home of industrial giants like Daewoo, Hyundai and Samsung, and a rough but thriving democracy in which the electorate regularly tosses out governments it dislikes.
If Kim is to realize his ambition, one suspects he knows it would take a war — and a compliant military, one reason undoubtedly for his executing the military chief he inherited and assuming the mantle of “the dear respected Marshal Kim Jong-un, brilliant commander.” The military “plan” to be discerned from regime pronouncements is that North Korea would try to engineer its response to a “military provocation” so that it would “not be limited to a local war, but develop into an all-out war, a nuclear war.” North Korean forces would “occupy all areas of South Korea” and would “blow up” U.S. bases “in its mainland and in the Pacific operational theatres including Hawaii and Guam.” Photos in the state-run Rodong newspaper showed Kim signing military orders against a backdrop of maps and a chart marked “U.S. mainland strike” with missile trajectories purportedly terminating in Washington, Los Angeles and elsewhere.
In moves which traditionally precede hostilities — and help to raise tensions — the North Korean government has advised foreign missions to leave Pyongyang (and, for good measure, Seoul too), while the North Korean military shut down its hotline link with the South.
Unusually for modern times, the United States and its allies have better developed plans for a new war on the Korean Peninsula than for any military scenario in a generation. A command structure has been in place since 1950 when the UN Security Council authorized the formation of the United Nations Command (UNC) which fought the Korean War. The structure has evolved over time, as have the forces committed to the defence of South Korea, largely in response to the expectations of South Koreans to play an ever larger role in their self-defence. Today, the principal war-fighting command is the U.S.South Korea Combined Forces Command (CFC) created in 1978. Linked to CFC is the 17-member UNC and the Multi-National Coordinating Centre (MNCC) established in 2009 to facilitate military support from key contributing nations such as the U.K., Canada, and Australia.
The Combined Forces Command has operational control of some 600,000 active duty personnel, including 37,500 U.S. forces based in South Korea. In wartime, the forces would be augmented by 3.5 million South Korean reservists, by U.S. forces located elsewhere in Asia on land and at sea, and by contributions from other countries. These forces are judged sufficient to defend South Korea from an attack with conventional weapons, although Seoul is dangerously exposed, being only 50 kilometres from the Demilitarized Zone. The North Korean forces are larger but of dubious quality, much less modern and in relative decline since the collapse of their Soviet patron. A North Korean attack employing non-conventional weapons — chemical, biological or nuclear — would almost surely be met by a response in kind which effectively destroyed society in the north.
The great unknown is whether North Korea has the capacity to deliver a nuclear strike at long distance employing ballistic missiles. Until recently, Obama administration officials have insisted North Korea had not mastered the technology to fabricate a nuclear weapon, mount a nuclear warhead on a missile, or build a missile with the range and accuracy to hit U.S. targets. The inadvertent disclosure at Congressional hearings on Thursday that the Defense Intelligence Agency now believes otherwise will surprise no one familiar the complacent assessments of other rogue regimes’ progress in acquiring weapons of mass destruction. The DIA reports “with moderate confidence that the North currently has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles; however the reliability will be low.”
Deterrence is the art of convincing your opponent not even to try something because of the consequences that would follow. Whether deterrence would work today depends entirely on how well Kim Jong-un understands the risks he is taking. Neither his father nor his grandfather (after 1953) ever took such risks.
Canada has more at stake than many realize. Partly, it’s a moral issue. After a slow start, Canada was the third largest contributor of forces to the UN Command during the Korean War. Some 26,000 Canadians fought in Korea and 516 died there. Threehundred-seventy-eight are buried in the UN Memorial Cemetery near Pusan.
Ever since, Canadians have continued to serve in the UNC. We have a 60-year legacy of engagement to explain our concern about current developments. But it’s also a matter of self defence. Those maps on the wall behind Kim Jong-un tell the story. Were North Korea to launch nucleararmed missiles against the United States, they would overfly Canadian territory to get there — assuming their reliability was not in fact low. Otherwise ...