Trump v Kim

[Montmorency]

Article Pro-Preemptive Strike on North Korean Nuclear Facilities by Edward Luttwak

It’s true that North Korea could retaliate for any attack by using its conventional rocket artillery against the South Korean capital of Seoul and its surroundings, where almost 20 million inhabitants live within 35 miles of the armistice line. U.S. military officers have cited the fear of a “sea of fire” to justify inaction. But this vulnerability should not paralyze U.S. policy for one simple reason: It is very largely self-inflicted.

When then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter decided to withdraw all U.S. Army troops from South Korea 40 years ago (ultimately a division was left behind), the defense advisors brought in to help — including myself — urged the Korean government to move its ministries and bureaucrats well away from the country’s northern border and to give strong relocation incentives to private companies. South Korea was also told to mandate proper shelters, as in Zurich for example, where every new building must have its own (under bombardment, casualties increase dramatically if people leave their homes to seek shelter). In recent years, moreover, South Korea has had the option of importing, at moderate cost, Iron Dome batteries, which are produced by both Israel and the United States, that would be capable of intercepting 95 percent of North Korean rockets headed to inhabited structures.

But over these past four decades, South Korean governments have done practically nothing along these lines. The 3,257 officially listed “shelters” in the Seoul area are nothing more than underground shopping malls, subway stations, and hotel parking lots without any stocks of food or water, medical kits or gas masks. As for importing Iron Dome batteries, the South Koreans have preferred to spend their money on developing a fighter-bomber aimed at Japan.

Even now, casualties could still be drastically reduced by a crash resilience program. This should involve clearing out and hardening with jacks, props, and steel beams the basements of buildings of all sizes; promptly stocking necessities in the 3,257 official shelters and sign-posting them more visibly; and, of course, evacuating as many as possible beforehand (most of the 20 million or so at risk would be quite safe even just 20 miles further to the south). The United States, for its part, should consider adding vigorous counterbattery attacks to any airstrike on North Korea.

Nonetheless, given South Korea’s deliberate inaction over many years, any damage ultimately done to Seoul cannot be allowed to paralyze the United States in the face of immense danger to its own national interests, and to those of its other allies elsewhere in the world.

In other words, ' South Korea, they can go eat and die. But hopefully they don't throw in with China after the liberation of the North - that would weaken Japan's security.'

And still laboring under the misapprehension that the nuclear program is just sitting out there in some barns and tin huts, easily susceptible to aerial bombardment; that all significant assets and facilities are known and would be targeted; or that North Korea couldn't quickly rebound with foreign assistance from even the most grievous setback. And if all America can accomplish is to "bloody their nose" without actually disabling nuclear capability at any point, we look weak. We look weak to the world.


It's weird. Luttwak is (or has been) a pre-eminent political scientist, yet he sure does seem to have a lot of dumb ideas where I've read them. Shades of Huntington and van Creveld?

Offhand, there was that one recent book on China and geopolitics where he massively up the military and diplomatic history of ancient China.