US has the might but risks are enormous
The Pentagon is expected to offer President Donald Trump a range of military options against North Korea if, as threatened by Trump, the United States acts alone against Pyongyang’s flouting of international rules controlling missiles and nuclear weapons.
Those options start with hacking into the computers running Kim Jong Un’s missiles and potentially culminating in airstrikes.
Cyberwarfare
An attack would focus on jamming or damaging Pyongyang’s intercontinental ballistic missile programme because of the escalating threat it poses.
The US has already proved its technical capabilities in this area, crippling many of the gas centrifuge systems inside Iran’s Natanz uranium-enrichment plant in 2008, with the covert insertion of a computer virus called Stuxnet.
In recent years many of North Korea’s missile test-launches have ended in disaster, suggesting that the US may have succeeded in attacking the systems with similar types of malicious virus, although some of the failures will have been down to poor engineering.
North Korea is more of a cyberwarfare challenge than Iran, mainly because the 200 ballistic missile launchers are mobile.
Special forces
To back up cyberattacks, special forces could be inserted to sabotage North Korea’s electricity grid and to try to pinpoint the location of the regime’s leadership.
This would be a high-risk mission, one Trump might feel reluctant to approve.
The capture of American military personnel would provide the North Korean leader with a propaganda coup that could undermine efforts to keep China on side.
Decapitation
Targeting Kim Jong Un and his closest military advisers with a single bombing mission by B-2 stealth bombers would depend on reliable and up-to-date intelligence of their whereabouts.
Even with all the signals intelligence apparatus at the disposal of the US military, the Pentagon could never be certain it had the leadership in its sights when the bombs are dropped.
‘‘Even if Kim Jong Un is killed, we would still have to hope that the North Korean military will collapse. It’s difficult to predict, and it’s possible that the decapitation of the North Korean leadership could trigger an immediate launch of long-range artillery shells against Seoul,’’ said Rodger Baker, senior analyst at Stratfor, a US think-tank.
Air strikes
This is the ultimate and most devastating solution and would involve a wave of bombing missions requiring up to a dozen B-2 stealth bombers, 24 F-22 Raptor stealth fighters, submarinelaunched Tomahawk cruise missiles and electronic warfare aircraft to suppress North Korean air-defence radar.
Any obvious build-up of American firepower in the region, however, could alert Pyongyang and might provoke the leadership into striking first at South Korea and at the locations of American troops in the region – 50,000 in Japan and 28,500 in South Korea – by launching Rodong ballistic missiles with a range of 1300 kilometres. There are some experts who believe the Rodong could have nuclear warheads.
America’s missile-defence systems – interceptors on Aegisclass warships and the land-based Thaad missiles now in South Korea – would try to counter such an attack.
However, Andrew Krepinevich, a former senior Pentagon adviser, said: ‘‘We don’t know if North Korea’s nuclear weapons are small enough to fit in the nose cone of a ballistic missile. But if they can, Kim Jong Un could launch a saturation attack, with only a few missiles armed with nuclear warheads. We’d have to try and intercept them all.’’
Assuming a surprise US air attack could be launched successfully, the B-2s would play the key initial role, as they can fly all the way from Whiteman air force base in Missouri and back again, evading North Korea’s relatively unsophisticated radars.
The B-2s, each armed with a 30,000-pound (13,600kg) bunkerbusting massive ordnance penetrator (Mop) bomb capable of bursting through layers of concrete before detonating, would be used to target all the known underground nuclear sites dotted around the country.
The F-22s, with a much shorter combat range, would launch their strikes from Japan or South Korea.
Armed with joint direct attack munitions (JDAM), the radarevading F-22s would target North Korea’s missile launchers and, together with hundreds of Tomahawk cruises, hit the massed array of artillery batteries located in camouflaged positions along the border with South Korea.
About 25 per cent of these howitzers have the range to hit downtown Seoul.
In a recent assessment, the Stratfor think tank concluded: ‘‘In a world of perfect intelligence, the US has the tools to dismantle the North Korean nuclear programme in a single, massive surprise strike. There are two huge unknowns, however. We do not have a comprehensive or precise picture of the North Korean nuclear programme, and we have no way of knowing just how good the US intelligence picture is.’’
North Korea has between ten and 20 nuclear bombs.
Underlining the unknowns facing the US, Krepinevich said: ‘‘One option for Kim would simply be to load a weapon onto a cargo ship and attempt to sail it into a Japanese or South Korean harbour – the ultimate suicide bomb.’’ – The Times