Tyrant can unleash most deadly war in generations

The Korean People’s Army is short on fuel for its vehicles, short on spare parts for its fighting machines and short on supplies for its troops.

Even its soldiers are short – malnutrition has left them several centimetres smaller than their well-fed southern counterparts.

But North Korea has made itself the master of what is known as ‘‘asymmetrical warfare’’, a strategy that invests, not in headto-head confrontation, but in carefully chosen, specialist attacks on the enemy’s weak points using small, highly-trained covert units.

If President Donald Trump’s promise to ‘‘solve North Korea’’ means launching a military strike, it could unleash the worst war that most of us have seen in our lifetimes.

It could begin with the deployment, on camouflaged mobile launchers, of all the nuclear warheads to have survived the initial American attack.

The North is believed to have 20 of these. They are not yet capable of reaching the American mainland, but even if only a handful survived they could put mushroom clouds over Seoul, Tokyo and even the US garrison island of Guam.

Meanwhile, if the North’s chain of command held, 3000 ‘‘information soldiers’’ of the Reconnaissance General Bureau would likely launch cyberattacks in an attempt to knock out power infrastructure and South Korean and US weapons systems.

Others would jam GPS signals, sowing confusion in the air and on the sea.

Small teams of commandos would be landed behind US and South Korean lines, by parachute and submarine, with orders to attack ports, airports and nuclear power stations and to spread terror.

Seoul estimates that the North has 200,000 troops in its special forces. Sleeper agents in the South, Japan and beyond would be activated to carry out sabotage and possibly suicide attacks.

North Korea has a fleet of warships, squadrons of ageing Russian fighter jets and a relatively new battle tank, the Pokpung-ho or Storm Tiger, which is similar to the Russian T-72.

But apart from its submarines, these would be outmanoeuvred and outgunned.

The greatest damage of all would be done by more than 13,000 long-range artillery pieces, dug in along the Demilitarised Zone which divides the two Koreas, and many of them capable of bombarding Seoul which is 50km from the border.

The North would quickly be defeated on the battlefield, but diehards would retreat to the hills and use stocks of hidden arms to launch a guerrilla war that could last years.

This assumes that China does not enter the war on the North’s side, as it did in 1950. Whether all this chaos and carnage would ‘‘solve North Korea’’ is unclear, to say the least. – The Times