The Other Tripwire for Korean War II

The Obama administration is apparently getting serious about organizing high seas interdictions of suspect vessels steaming from North Korea. This is wise and necessary. But as many have noted interdictions risk escalating into open conflict if North Korea responds violently to the capture of its ships.

There is another more hidden tripwire for large-scale hostilities out there too as the newest tensions between Washington and Pyongyang mount. If the White House is indeed serious about grabbing North Korean ships, the Pentagon will almost certainly beef up both naval forces and ground troops in and around South Korea. The last time the United States did this was in the 1994 crisis, when North Korea’s nuclear program first came to light.

In that standoff, the Clinton White House drew up plans to destroy North Korea’s main nuclear reactor with airstrikes and positioned ground forces and naval assets to face an expected North Korean retaliation against South Korea. But North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, then ailing and in the twilight of his time in power, seemed to have misread the U.S. thinking behind the buildup, which he watched carefully. He apparently thought the U.S. forces gathering around the Korean peninsula might be planning an invasion of North Korea. And he seemed at the time determined to strike first if that were the case. Kim Il-sung had paid close attention to the 1991 Gulf War, in which U.S. forces openly massed around Iraq while Saddam Hussein basically just sat and watched in a false sense of comfort. No way was Kim Il-sung going to let that happen to him.

Kim Jong-il, like his father in 1994, is ailing and approaching the end of his time in power. He mostly likely had a stroke recently, leaving his ability to think through strategic moments looming ahead as the current crisis escalates impaired. And let’s not forget that even on his sharpest days Kim Jong-il is a deeply freaky paranoid hermit who leads a massive army that worships him like a cult. See today’s news about the sentencing of two U.S. journalists to 12 years of hard labor for the latest example of dark North Korean weirdness and unpredictability.

In the weeks and months ahead, Kim Jong-il may make the same miscalculation that nearly led his father to launch a pre-emptive war or commit some other worse blunder with potentially bloody consequences for thousands. No one should envy the Obama administration officials tasked with trying to guess what counter-moves Pyongyang may make as the White House goes forward with its new measures to deal with the North Korean threat.

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.