Key Points

• Opening exchanges would be swift, and catastrophic
• Artillery is a major factor
• Dense population centers are challenging
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Summary

Austin Smith and Michael Muir discuss the potential outcome of a war between North and South Korea. They consider the opening exchanges, focusing on the concentration of South Korea’s population in the northwest, including Seoul. North Korea’s significant artillery capabilities pose a severe threat, potentially causing enormous casualties and economic damage in a short time. Despite South Korea’s military superiority, the cost of victory would be devastating. The discussion highlights the catastrophic consequences of an unrestrained artillery attack on densely populated areas and the challenges South Korea would face in such a conflict.

Transcript:

Do a little role play there.

So you talked about how unlikely it is that South Korea does cross over that line for all the reasons you just discussed.

But what would a war look like if tanks are nullified and South Korea has a really robust navy and there’s defense agreements in place with China and Russia and the United States?

What would it actually look like?

Well, I think the opening exchanges would give us a really good idea of how the war would pan out.

And obviously we’re talking a hypothetical here, but the thing about South Korea’s population is where it’s concentrated, right?

So Seoul and the surrounding areas.

There’s a lot of cities quite close to Seoul.

I already mentioned Incheon, there’s Suwon, Gwangju.

About half of Korea’s population resides in a pretty concentrated area in the Northwest of South Korea, which is completely within range of North Korean artillery.

So it would really depend on what North Korea does in the opening exchanges.

Now, I think one scenario that could happen is perhaps South Korea and the United States launched preemptive attacks because there’s a credible threat.

So yeah, North Korea has a lot of options about what it can do.

I don’t think there’s any question whatsoever about the end result of a conflict between North and South Korea.

South Korea is just far too strong, but the cost of victory is also far too great.

So North Korea could inflict enormous economic damage.

There are some production facilities that are basically in sight of the DMZ.

There’s a gigantic LED production facility in Paju, which is really just a stone’s throw from the DMZ, but then there’s a lot of surrounding production facilities and docks in and around Seoul.

If there was an unrestrained, and I did look at some analysis of this, if North Korea launched attacks directly at Seoul’s population centers, which It’s probably unlikely, again, because if they wanted assistance from Russia and China, that might stop it.

But if they launched just conventional artillery, which is essentially impossible to defend without taking it out first, the analysis that I read from the RAND Corporation said that in a little over an hour, and that’s not with all their artillery, 130,000 casualties in one hour.

There’s just a gigantic number of people there.

They’ve got nowhere to go.

The results would be catastrophic.

A high density of people, a difficulty to defend against the artillery, the challenges of even escaping a city in just a densely populated area just make it an absolutely tragic outcome there.

Even if you just take away, if you just… to putting the numbers to one side, just the sheer panic and demoralization that would cause just one unrestrained barrage against a major that such a densely populated area would just be absolutely catastrophic.

And again, Korea and North Korea just went for so-called legitimate military targets, maybe production facilities.

There’s no lack of them and there’s nowhere for them to go.

So that’s the really difficult thing that’s facing South Korea again there’s a huge mismatch in terms of conventional forces but the price they would have to pay to defeat North Korea is just not worth it.

Yeah, I mean, that brings up a question, which is, it seems maybe, I don’t want to say inevitable, but almost certain that South Korea would win a conflict.

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