Over a Barrel with North Korea

by John Thompson

01/13/03

Opponents of a war with Iraq have been asking "Why isn’t the US threatening to attack North Korea?" Good question, but one with a simple answer.

America’s objectives with Iraq are simple: The primary objective is to keep Saddam Hussein from being able to menace the US, his neighbors and the world with weapons of mass destruction. The less-stated objective is to topple the Tyrant of Tikrit altogether and give the people of Iraq a better chance.

It is true that the North Korea’s Kim Jong Il (the son of their founding mass-murderer Kim Il Sung) is as dangerous to his own people and to the world as Saddam Hussein. The people of North Korea live in fear and destitution while their leaders have sacrificed almost everything to ensure that the country is (proportional to its 22 million population) the most heavily armed one in the world.

North Korea has the capacity to manufacture most chemical weapons and, given their usual priorities, are believed by most analysts to have produced huge stocks of them. The same is true of biological weaponry. Ballistic missiles can be easily spotted from space, and North Korea has huge stocks of them, both short range Scuds and Frogs and longer range missiles of its own design — one of which they fired over Japan a few years ago.

Given the usual secrecy and distortions attendant to most Communist Countries’ reports on their economy, getting an honest read on North Korea’s economic performance is next to impossible, but it does seem that "machinery parts" (e.g. missile components) are a leading export. They sell their own version of the old Soviet Scud short range ballistic missile to any who care to buy them, and have aided Pakistan, Iran and Iraq with their ballistic missile programs. Pakistan has also acknowledged North Korea’s support with its own nuclear weapons programs.

North Korea has even more lives on its hands than Saddam’s Iraq does. They initiated the Korean War of 1950-53 (one in which at least 2.5 million people died) and are estimated to have murdered another 1.6 million people outside of that conflict. Additionally, for most of the 1990s, severe famine conditions prevailed in much of the country, and their Government’s absurd credo of Juche (acute self-reliance) placed major limitations on foreign aid and at least another million people starved to death.

Add to this are North Korea’s support of terrorist groups elsewhere in the world, and its occasional incursions into South Korea, and it is clear that this is one regime that deserves to be toppled by force. But…

If push came to shove, North Korea could kill tens of thousands of South Koreans and Japanese in a few minutes. This impoverished country is a heavily armed one that has prepared itself for Round Two of the Korean War for almost 50 years. Huge stocks of fuel and ammunition have preserved in massive tunnels and bunkers (some of which also contain whole tank battalions) all along the DMZ between it and South Korea. These are not defensive works, but are prepared jump-off points for the next time they invade.

And the North does have a lot of combat power: It has 6,200 tanks and armoured vehicles close to the DMZ. It also has 9,700 artillery pieces and multiple rocket launchers — many of which are heavy long-range weapons… and the crowded city of Seoul South Korea is well within reach. Saddam Hussein cannot inundate Kuwait City with thousands of tons of nerve gas in half an hour (yet), but Kim Jung Il could easily treat Seoul this way. Ballistic missiles can deliver chemical weapons, and most of Japan’s cities as well as those of South Korea are in easy reach of North Korea’s rockets.

Leaving aside the question of the millions of potential hostages within reach of North Korea’s armaments, the North also knows that its Air Force is totally outmatched by the US and South Korean forces in the area; but they still have formidable air defences. They have over 7,000 anti-aircraft guns and 10,000 missile launchers of various types — enough to mean that chewing through their air defences would be slow and costly. Moreover, the North Koreans remember the total aerial dominance that the UN had during the Korean War, and have thus heavily entrenched and shielded much of their critical infrastructure.

Is North Korea more of a problem than Iraq? Yup. Can it be easily dealt with? Nope.

Should Iraq be kept from becoming another North Korea? Absolutely.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca