'There is no South Korean leader who thinks a first strike by the US is okay': Experts in Asia weigh in on North Korea

Thomson Reuters

This story originally appeared on Business Insider Japan and has been translated from Japanese.

The Trump administration has been exploring options, including use of military force, to counter North Korea's growing nuclear and missile threat.

Meanwhile, some US media, most notably Geopolitical Futures, are reporting that US military action on the Korean Peninsula is increasingly likely.

They interpret the US Navy aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan joining the USS Carl Vinson off the coast of Japan — putting two carriers near the Korean Peninsula — as a sign that the US military is ready to attack North Korea at any time with fighters and Tomahawk missiles.

Their hawkish argument appears to be convincing amid heightened tensions in the region, propelled by North Korea’s continuing ballistic missiles for three weeks in a row.

But more than a few leading military experts in Japan, South Korea and the US still say that military options against North Korea are all-but-impossible.  

Any US military action against Pyongyang entails high damage risks on Seoul and Tokyo, they say, and they believe the US will be forced to shelve plans for military intervention eventually.

Anyone who claims the US will attack North Korea sooner or later should consider this question: If the Trump administration is really serious about attacking Pyongyang, why doesn't the US issue any Noncombatant Evacuation Operations (NEO) order for more than 100,000 Americans in Seoul?

The US would need to start carrying Seoul-based Americans by C130 and other aircraft to Okinawa or Kyushu in Japan immediately — or accept risks to leave them to die.

Six days after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the US Embassy in Japan advised American citizens living within 50 miles of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant to evacuate. 

Issei Kato/ReutersWhy doesn’t  the US issues such an evacuation order now in Seoul if the US attack is imminent?

Former Japanese defense minister Satoshi Morimoto said the US and Japan cannot issue a warning to evacuate hundreds of thousands of their citizens in South Korea because North Korea will surely notice and may make a preemptive attack against the US and Japan.

Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo on May 26, Morimoto said a US preemptive attack would be very risky business.

“A preemptive attack cannot destroy everything,” Morimoto said. “If they have remaining nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, they will make a retaliation against the US and its neighbors.”

The recent move by the US Navy in the Pacific looks like yet another one of the Trump administration’s bluffs against North Korea and China.

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on May 19 that any military solution to the North Korea crisis would be "tragic on an unbelievable scale" and that the US was working internationally to find a diplomatic solution. 

Reuters/KCNA KCNASecurity experts in East Asia also strongly caution against the high risks of a pre-emptive strike against North Korea by the US, even if American media circles do not fully understand this.

 “North Korea will show a very strong reaction against [a preemptive strike] because it would be an attack against its national security,” Suh Choo-suk, a Senior Research Fellow at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA), said at a symposium at Keio University in Tokyo in March.

Suh agreed with Morimoto that North Korea would retaliate against a preemptive strike.

“Even if the US and South Korean military capabilities of the first strike are superior, they cannot destroy all of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities all at once,” Suh said. “In response, North Korea will surely conduct a nuclear attack against South Korea and the US. It will use all of its various methods of attack such as long-range artillery.”

It is well known that the Clinton administration considered the military option during the so-called “first nuclear crisis” of the early 1990s. It estimated a surgical attack against North Korean nuclear facilities could lead to the death of more than one million South Koreans and more than 100,000 Americans in Seoul. 

Since then, Suh said that North Korea’s military capabilities have developed further, leaving the potential for more casualties.

“There is no South Korean leader who thinks the first strike by the US is okay,” Suh said. 

Gary Cameron/ReutersAccording to the Japanese government’s 2016 Defense White Paper, the North Korean Army comprises about 1.02 million personnel, and roughly two-thirds of them are believed to be deployed along the demilitarized zone (DMZ).

Military experts agree that North Korea holds the strategic high ground against the South: Seoul is less than 40 kilometers from the DMZ, while Pyongyang is about 150 kilometers from it. As a result, Seoul is more vulnerable than Pyongyang militarily.

Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence from 2009 to 2010, said that North Korea’s thousands of tunnels present a difficulty in gathering intelligence. It would be difficult, he said, to pinpoint exactly where the North Korean nuclear facilities are located.

Echoing Morimoto’s view, he said using a surgical strike to take out North Korean nuclear facilities would be risky, according to the South China Morning Post.

At an event organized by the National Committee on US-China Relations, Blair was asked if the US may have to accept a nuclear-armed North Korea.

Blair said yes.  

Finally, consider North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s recent appearance on April 11 at the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), an annual parliament where Kim Jong Un’s grandfather Kim Il-sung and his father Kim Jong Il seldom appeared.

“Despite increasing pressure from the US, he intentionally appeared at the parliament,” Hajime Izumi, a professor at Tokyo International University, said. “He didn’t need to do so. He knows the US won’t attack for sure.”

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