If the United States were to strike North Korea, Kim Jong Un’s regime would retaliate by unleashing its conventional weaponry lined up on the demilitarized zone that has separated the two Koreas for about seven decades.
And that conventional weaponry is reliable, unlike North Korea’s missiles, and could cause major devastation in South Korea, which is a staunch ally of the United States.
“This becomes a very limiting factor for the U.S.,” said Carl Baker, a retired Air Force officer with extensive experience in South Korea.
As tensions between North Korea and the outside world have risen over the past month, there has been increasing talk about the United States using military force either to preempt a North Korean provocation or to respond to one.
That talk continues even after it emerged that the Navy had not sent an aircraft carrier strike group to the Korean Peninsula region, as officials, including President Donald Trump, had implied.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said this week that he supported striking North Korea to stop it from developing the capability to reach the United States with a missile – even if that came at a huge cost for the region.
“It would be terrible, but the war would be over [in South Korea], it wouldn’t be here,” Graham said in an interview with NBC.
Although most of the recent focus has been on North Korea’s ambition to be able to strike the continental United States with a missile, the people of South Korea have been living under the constant threat of a conventional North Korean attack for decades.
North Korea has “a tremendous amount of artillery” right opposite Seoul, said Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., a senior imagery analyst at 38 North, a website focused on North Korea.
The Second Corps of the Korean People’s Army stationed at Kaesong on the northern side of the DMZ has about 500 artillery pieces, Bermudez said. And this is just one army corps; similar corps are on either side of it.
All the artillery pieces in the Second Corps can reach the northern outskirts of Seoul, just 30 miles from the DMZ, but the largest projectiles could fly to the south of the capital. About 25 million people – or half of the South Korean population – live in the greater Seoul metropolitan area.
“It’s the tyranny of proximity,” said David Maxwell, who served in South Korea during his 30 years in the Army and now teaches at Georgetown University. “Imagine a million man army just outside the Beltway with artillery they could use to terrorize Washington.”
If North Korea were to start unleashing its artillery on the South, it would be able to fire about 4,000 rounds an hour, Roger Cavazos of the Nautilus Institute estimated in a 2012 study. There would be 2,811 fatalities in the initial volley and 64,000 people could be killed that first day, the majority of them in first three hours, he wrote.
Some of the victims would be American, because the United States military has about 28,000 troops in South Korea. The higher estimates for the 300 mm rocket launcher’s range – up to 65 miles – would put the U.S. Air Force base at Osan and the new military garrison at Pyeongtaek, the replacement for the massive base in Seoul, within reach.
This prospect of massive damage and casualties has restrained successive American administrations, however provocative North Korea has been.
“Every U.S. administration, as they have looked at this problem, has said that all options are available. But that’s not really true,” said Baker, who is now at the Pacific Forum of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We really don’t have a military option.”