How Close is War with North Korea?

Few realize how close the United States came to war with North Korea in 1994, when Pyongyang’s nuclear program was first discovered by U.S. spy satellites. The Clinton White House was unwilling to allow plutonium reprocessing underway at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor and came up with a plan to bomb it. They figured they could destroy the facility and entomb radioactive material in one stroke with precision airstrikes. The catch: North Korea would likely retaliate with a massive artillery and missile barrage on Seoul and elsewhere in South Korea, sparking all-out war on the peninsula. Pentagon officials calculated that the ensuing battles would likely leave between 300,000 and 500,000 American and South Korean soldiers dead along with hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Such a war was only days away from unfolding in 1994. For the best account of the saga, see Don Oberdorfer’s excellent book the Two Koreas, which goes a long way towards explaining why North Korea remains such a dangerous and difficult issue for the current White House.

In the 1994 crisis, the bombing of the Yongbyon reactor loomed as the trigger for what would surely be the bloodiest fighting seen in Asia since Vietnam. An eleventh-hour political bargain between Washington and Pyongyang diffused the situation. But North Korea’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons poses a new trigger for such a war today. U.S. Naval intercepts of North Korean vessels thought to be carrying nuclear materials could occur in the seeable future as Washington grows increasingly worried and watchful of what comes and goes off the North Korean coast. North Korea has already said it would consider such intercepts an act of war and warned South Korea not to cooperate with U.S. Naval efforts.

It’s hard to know, honestly, how strongly North Korea would react if the United States or South Korea captured one of its ships carrying nuclear weapons or materials. Would North Korea’s leadership beat their chests or bomb Seoul? Pyongyang regularly airs venomous war rhetoric towards the United States and South Korea, much of which can be dismissed as the wackiness of a hermetic Stalinist regime. But I suspect that North Korea would be willing to fight for real over the one national treasure the desperately impoverished country holds, nukes. Which means a war like one the United States and North Korea were both ready to fight in 1994 may be nearer than we realize.