The Potential Korea Escalation

May 29, 2009

In the next days there will likely be a military clash between North and South Korea. With hardliners on both side and little attention in Washington a small sea skirmish could escalate into something much bigger.

Today North Korea launched another missile, this a ground-to-air one and warned of further measures. It clearly wants attention though not from the UN Security Council. From the AP account:

"If the U.N. Security Council makes a further provocation, it will be inevitable for us to take further self-defense measures," the North's Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

North Korea also accused the Security Council of hypocrisy.

"There is a limit to our patience," the statement said. "The nuclear test conducted in our nation this time is the Earth's 2,054th nuclear test. The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council have conducted 99.99 percent of the total nuclear tests."
…
Fears have increased of military skirmishes, particularly in disputed waters off the western coast, after North Korea conducted the nuclear test on Monday and then renounced the truce that has kept peace between the Koreas since the Korean War ended in 1953.

That would be this line which the North wants to have moved further down.

Some historic background on that line can be found in this Joong Ang Daily piece from 2007.

There are already signs that something is imminent to happen there. AP continues:

From Yeonpyeong, the South Korean island closest to North Korea, about a dozen Chinese ships could be seen pulling out of port in the North and heading elsewhere. South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported that more than 280 Chinese vessels were fishing in the area earlier this week, but the number has dropped to about 140.

In 1999 and 2002 North Korean patrol ships crossed the line which led to small sea battles with several dead and wounded on each side.

The South Koreans government is prepared and has threatened escalating retaliation against any hostile action:

The official said if North Korea attacks South Korean naval or civilian vessels, the South will counter by targeting North Korean ships’ missile bases. An official in the South Korean Navy also said the South’s forces are preparing to thwart the North’s ground-to-ship or ship-to-ship missiles.

To respond to a sea skirmish with an attack on land missile bases is an escalation which likely would be answered with an escalation which likely would be answered …

Let us hope that in the event of a small sea clash South Korea does not take the threatened step. The North would certainly answer and the whole issue could get out of hand.

The UN Security Council has not yet decided if or how to sanction North Korea for its second nuclear test. Writes the AP:

Russia's U.N. ambassador said Thursday there was wide agreement among key world powers on what a new U.N. resolution should include, but said putting the elements together will take time because the issues are "complicated."

…
Diplomats said a draft of the proposed resolution is not expected to be circulated until next week.

Well – the draft is available here (pdf), retrieved by Inner City Press, but the crucial paragraph 8 is yet empty.

But it may not matter much anyway. North Korea will likely respond to any UN Council resolution with some aggressive measure. What will be crucial now is how South Korea will respond to that. The hard line government of President Lee Myung-bak is under pressure after unproven corruption allegations against former President Roh Moo-hyun led to his suicide:

Former president Kim Dae-jung, Roh’s immediate predecessor, had accepted the invitation by Roh’s aides to give the eulogy, but the idea was vetoed by the incumbent administration, said Cheon Ho-seon, former presidential spokesman for Roh. The Lee government said letting Kim give the speech in the presence of other former presidents will raise a “fairness issue.”

After visiting the mourning altar in front of Seoul Station yesterday morning, Kim harshly criticized the Lee government.

…
“The prosecution has conducted probes of the children and relatives of Roh but none of the corruption allegations has been confirmed by the day of his death,” Kim continued. “Does it make sense that the prosecution has failed to come up with any evidence 20 days after questioning the former president?” The 2000 Nobel Peace Prize awardee also added that the Lee administration’s moves to block the entrance to Seoul Plaza downtown and prohibit his speech signal “an enormous digression from democracy.”

The government put a lot of police into the streets to suppress any demonstrations against it during or after Roh's funeral today. It may even hope that some escalation with the North diverts attention from interior South Korean issues, the Roh suicide and the economic situation.

Washington should better have more attention on this. Ultimately the North wants security guarantees from the U.S. so it can eventually open up its economy while the regime can stand in place. The U.S. pressing China for harder sanctions now will not be enough to avoid a potentially very deadly war.

Posted by b on May 29, 2009 at 14:31 UTC | Permalink

Comments

The big question is will South Korea fully participate in the Proliferation Security Initiative.

Posted by: dh | May 29 2009 14:37 utc | 1

@dh – SoKo already said only within its waters, i.e. 12 mile zone. PSI is not much relevant there.

Posted by: b | May 29 2009 14:59 utc | 2

Right, but SoKo has given tacit agreement. I don’t know how the ship searching works, who actually does it and how, but it could well be the spark that sets the whole thing off.

Posted by: dh | May 29 2009 15:15 utc | 3

Reminds me of this article.
Seen from Japan, the tone in the NHK evening news was not so alarmist. I doubt the US will really press China hard on the sanctions (only in front of the media); sanctions won’t work well anyway. But I suspect China will be/is working hard to avoid the bad case scenarios. The last thing China wants is social disturbances (refugees, etc) on its north-eastern frontier.

Posted by: Philippe | May 29 2009 15:20 utc | 4

@Phillipe – thanks for the link
Yes, it is possible that this is “Plan B”, NoKo’s “go-it-alone” strategy, but it could also be just another stage of “Plan A” to press for better relations by being nasty.
Kim Myong Cho, the unofficial NoKo spokesperson is funny. He is connected and at the core explains what is going on, but he also seems to believe in the bombast NoKo’s domestic propaganda distributes. It is sometimes difficult to find out what he really is told to say.
A 2000 Kim Myong Cho interview with Newsweek: Korean Unity In Five Years?

Posted by: b | May 29 2009 16:45 utc | 5

What is this about?
Nuke tuneup raises concerns
By the Los Angeles Times
Posted: 05/29/2009 01:00:00 AM MDT
A decade-long effort to refurbish thousands of aging nuclear warheads has run into serious technical problems that have forced delays and exacerbated concerns about the Energy Department’s ability to maintain the United States’ strategic deterrent.
The program involves a type of warhead known as the W-76, which is used on the Navy’s Trident missile system and makes up more than half of the deployed warheads in the U.S. stockpile. The refurbishment program is aimed at replacing thousands of parts that have aged since the bombs left the factory 20 to 30 years ago.
Although the nation’s nuclear weapons are functional and reliable, the W-76 issue represents one of the most serious setbacks in the nuclear-weapons program at least since the end of the Cold War, several experts said.
At issue with the W-76, at least in part, is a classified component in the original weapon that engineers and scientists at the Energy Department’s plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., could not duplicate over the past several years.
The component, known by the code word “fogbank,” is thought to be made of an exotic material and is crucial to a hydrogen bomb reaching its designed energy level in the microseconds before it blows apart.
“I don’t know how this happened, that we forgot how to make fogbank,” said Philip Coyle, a former deputy director at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Posted by: ds | May 29 2009 17:22 utc | 6

Shit happens. I lost a recipe for rhubarb crumble once. Never been able to get it quite right since.

Posted by: dh | May 29 2009 17:30 utc | 7

I’m pretty sure this is more of a tempest in a teapot.
SoKo is utterly terrified of any real escalation of the conflict; NoKo has virtually all of its weaponry aimed at either Seoul or Japan — enough to wipe out most of Seoul within days, perhaps hours. Its defenses are stout enough to give that weaponry the time to do its work.
By exaggerating the threat from NoKo, the U.S. and SoKo government gain a great deal — distraction from Roh’s funeral and message on the one hand, and reinforcement for further action against the NoKo regime (and, by extension, China) on the other.
I think this is a gambit being played by U.S. and South Korean reactionaries, and i think it will play out to their disadvantage.

Posted by: china_hand2 | May 29 2009 18:45 utc | 8

@ds – the FOGBANK issue is nonsense from people who want to build new nuclear warheads (the call them “Reliable replacements warheads”) It is all nonsense.
The FOGBANK issue is well explained here and

Posted by: b | May 29 2009 18:50 utc | 9

@China-hand2 – I think this is a gambit being played by U.S. and South Korean reactionaries, and i think it will play out to their disadvantage.
But why does Kim Jong-il collaborate with them? He is launching missiles after all or do you doubt that?

Posted by: b | May 29 2009 18:53 utc | 10

@9 – Thanks b. Nonsense, indeed.

Posted by: ds | May 29 2009 20:03 utc | 11

After reading many of the comments over at mifi, with regards to the recent turn of events, including but not limited to DPRK’s forced(?)arms race, I’m not too optimistic that even the bright and some what open minded, (if quite hip/snarky) community there gets it. On a side note, I concur with the following comment, “I’m fairly confident I will see nuclear warfare in my lifetime. There are not enough resources to go around.”
However, the ultimate madness of the American exceptionalism is stunning.
The fine community there does not get it, ‘it’ being what Gurdjieff called “the horror of our situation,” and the horror of our situation being in the circus of what Bob Wilson wrote about in Wilhelm Reich in Hell. Namely, there are two horrors in our nuclear age- one that of the pacifists all protest, in that we are ruled by men whom are willing to contemplate the use of those weapons (mostly because they have the power of complete safety and insulation ) and the one that Reich protested, in that most people are so brainwashed by the constructed reality of authoritarianism that even at this emergency stage of terrestrial evolution they still follow and obey these diabolical maniacs who threaten us with total annihilation should a Thermo-Nuclear war break out.
Back to my point on the general commentators at mifi, mostly American, they fail to see the hallucination of America in general as the good guys. A complete Aristotelian delusion of two valued True and False logic that damn well may threaten the entire planet on an egocentric delusion of grandeur.
Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor On the The Flexible Floor Doctrine: Thermo-Nuclear Monarchy
i am become death …

Posted by: Uncle $cam | May 29 2009 21:13 utc | 12

@b, comment 10.
I don’t think N.Korea is collaborating in the US/SoKo game. In the short term, they (NoKo) are desperate to get some kind of negotiations going. For a simple reason: the absolutely [b]need[/b] fuel delivery for the coming winter. NoKo has a very harsh winter. US/Soko on the other hand is using and abusing the situation to put pressure on China. They’d love for NoKo to collapse completely, and occupy the space (getting closer to the border). On the other hand – NoKo is quite independently minded (see the post by China_hand2 in the previous NoKo thread), they also want to put pressure on China. Multiple tangos…
One thing to keep in mind in this whole discussion: there is only an armistice between NoKo and SoKo/US. Technically they are still at war. This has, from an international legal perspective, serious implications (ref: ‘open the economy’). One of the goals of every attempt at negotiations over the past 15 years (for NoKo and probably China) is getting past this state of armistice to something more stable (peace treaty kind of thing).
And something odd: for the past week or so, we’ve had very un-seasonal cold weather here in S. Japan. A strong depression has been centered around Kyushu, blowing northerly winds. The seasonal rain front is stuck far south of Okinawa, whereas it should slowly reach Kyushu by now. This has serious implications for the agriculture in the region (including NoKo). That rain front brings the much needed rains for the rice fields, and the cold weather doesn’t help with the crops either.
[footnote]Oh yeah – and summer is coming: traditionally a season for fireworks in East Asia ! 🙂 NoKo goes with big fireworks this year ? [/end not serious footnote]

Posted by: Philippe | May 30 2009 1:06 utc | 13

Regarding the Chinese fishing boats moving out of the area: not sure what to think about that. One would have to check the usual fishing patterns, the sea currents, etc, and also the weather in the area. Off hand, I wouldn’t read too much in it.

Posted by: Philippe | May 30 2009 1:11 utc | 14

Now…why would you think South Koreans and US are actually on the same side? Their interests are completely different: regardless of who is in power, South Koreans don’t want to see the North “blow up” under any circumstance. US, on the other hand, doesn’t really care if North Korea does blow up. Of course, North Korean leadership don’t want to be blown up either. That gives the Koreans on both sides of DMZ some incentive to cooperate, unofficially or officially, against the US. Exaggerating North Korean threats gives the South an excuse to not even engage in token cooperation, say, with regards to NPI, with the US. Seoul and Pyongyang are in cahoots on this–even if they deny it.

Posted by: kao_hsien_chih | May 30 2009 2:12 utc | 15

@b:
Wasn’t it here that i read there’s a power play going on in the North, right now, with people haggling over Kim’s vegetative political corpse? That’s one solid explanation for the recent shenanigans, right there.
A second reason is that the North really does feel it needs those weapons, as Gao Xianzhi says just above. However, i disagree with him on another important point: much of the most powerful leadership in South Korea’s Grand National Party will always be quite firmly aligned with whatever the U.S. dictates for North Korean policy. Many of those people really do see the communist regime and anyone who collaborates with it as “evil”, and would be quite happy to blast them to pieces — and could care less about who gets in the way. They are held in check, though, by most of the Korean population; that, and the fact that the North has such a vast arsenal of weaponry aimed at their largest city and industrial centers (the GNP has never let anything so trivial as mass protests by their own population stop them from undertaking a slaughter).
So: internal jockeying for control of the military and future military policy; provocations by one group, perhaps with the aim of forcing outside nations like the U.S. and U.N. to the bargaining table, whereby they hope to set up a client relationship like the South enjoys; provocations by some other group determined to guarantee the security of the North Korean state — these are all excellent, simple possibilities that may form the North Korean motives for the missile tests.
Yet the last thing the North wants to do is actually start a war, particularly now, when Kim is probably laying on his deathbed, unable to speak — the U.S. and Japan, though, have been hoping for sixty years, now, to be able to get enough of an upper-hand in that conflict to safely overrun the North and take control of the entire country. So basically, any language of escalation on the North’s part can be pretty safely considered a bargaining chip, while their missile and bomb tests can be considered rational security measures by a (justifiably) fearful, isolated state.
Genuine escalation, though — that’s probably not going to come from South Korea, North Korea, China or (for the moment, at least) Japan. That leaves one party: the United States. But again, the U.S. is currently tied up in two wars; the only way it could conceivably win a conflict with the North is if it used nuclear weapons on a massively destructive scale. I just can’t see that happening, right now —
but i can easily see this as a gambit, as a ploy to provoke the world into accepting the idea of a nuclear first-strike against a nation perceived as “going rogue”. Europe, China, Russia and Japan would currently reject the idea, but who knows what would happen if a relatively contained shooting war did suddenly break out along the DMZ?
I can also see this as a ploy to increase international resolve for an invasion of North Korea — and since that would probably involve nuclear weapons, thus, again, we return to issue of manipulating world agreements to support a limited nuclear first-strike. Of course, the first implementation of any changes in nuclear agreements probably wouldn’t happen in North Korea. It’d be Iran. So North Korea may be getting used as the lever to try and pry open that particular clam.
Finally, i can also see it as an attempt by the U.S. and Japan to try and shatter North Korean political unity. With the Grand Leader (or whatever the fuck they call him) struck down and incapacitated, these missile tests are just the excuse for the U.S. to try and put the fear of god into some small sub-section of the North Korean leadership — and the hope would be that they’d ruthlessly wrest control of the country from the others, and then turn to the U.S. to negotiate a sellout. While it’s not something i could ever envision actually working, it’s something i could easily envision Washington think tanks pushing forward in a bid to justify their salaries.
At any rate, i will confidently declare: North Korea isn’t stupid and suicidal; it’s just desperate and starving. South Korea still considers the North as “Korean”, the vast majority there don’t want a war, and nobody there is interested in paying the human costs such a war would demand. As for China, the last thing it wants is a major war on its weakest border (and the same goes for Japan, as well).
That leaves only one party who could see this situation as something worth escalating and who could possibly gain anything from the current rhetoric: the U.S. The U.S. has shown that it is vicious and stupid enough to force wars of aggression for the meanest of reasons, and it has repeatedly shown that it won’t let anything like basic human decency stand in the way of isolating China and Iran. Since the current situation holds so many positive potentialities for the U.S. — and so little for anyone else — i just can’t see this as being anything more than saber rattling.

Posted by: china_hand2 | May 30 2009 5:33 utc | 16

F-22s to Okinawa: US deploy jets as North Korea tensions rise

Posted by: b | May 30 2009 9:08 utc | 17

The aircraft, also known as Raptors, took off from their home base in Langley, Virginia earlier this week, and are set to be deployed in the region for four months. Okinawa plays host to the bulk of the roughly 50,000 U.S. military personnel based in Japan.
Coincidence. This was a regularly scheduled deployment, nothing else.

Posted by: china_hand2 | May 30 2009 9:52 utc | 18

I should’ve said that looks like a regularly scheduled deployment — i’m in no position to say authoritatively that it is or isn’t. Silly of me to presume.
But i wanted to point out this, that i came across in SST, from a South Korean poster, there:

I talked with a few senior analyst in KIDA(a kind of US RAND corp equivalent), and they said SK will not board NK ship directly. For South Korea, PSI means the alignment with US-leading sanction, not spoiling position with nationalistic mentality. SK will not act alone. So effectiveness of PSI depends on US leadership.

So if what he says is accurate, then what we’ve got is a new agreement that the SoKo forces clearly are interpreting as a U.S. initiative, and who are approaching it with the trust that the U.S. leadership will act rationally.
So let’s hope the U.S. acts rationally.

Posted by: china_hand2 | May 30 2009 10:20 utc | 19

Very true that the main stabilizing factor is mutually-assured destruction at the peninsular level. The concentration of conventional artillery on Seoul makes any war a ten-minute one. The US has known for decades that only nukes can win that war. The chief risk is letting the coup-plotters go out and play c.f. @16 ¶8, and the odds there depend on the extent to which Bush’s CIA purge has been undone.

Posted by: …—… | May 30 2009 12:59 utc | 20

I didn’t know this but it now scares me a bit:

South Korea has a joint military partnership with the United States as outlined by the Mutual Defense Treaty signed on 1951. Commander U.S. Seventh Fleet (C7F) is designated as Commander Combined Naval Component Command (CCNCC) “for the defense of the Korean peninsula; in the event of hostilities, all friendly naval forces in the theater would fall under C7F control.”[33] The ROK and US Governments have agreed on the transfer of wartime operational control to the South Korean government in 2012.

So the SoKo Navy is essentially under U.S. command – hmmm.

Posted by: b | May 30 2009 14:11 utc | 21

This is an excellent thread. Re Chinahand’s very insightful analysis, I just have to say that if the U.S. were to stir up real destabilizing battle with NoKo, I can’t believe China wouldn’t take economic measures to put a sudden severe hurt on the U.S. domestic economy, even though it would be painful for China in various ways to do so. And presumably the Commander of the 7th Fleet and all these great thinkers in the Pentagon and the White House know it.

Posted by: Maxcrat | May 30 2009 17:35 utc | 22

re China pressuring the US economically. I suspect they have already done that and got spoken to very crossly from the US. If you consider this as our elites would, to be an attack on our way of life, threats of retaliation would be intimated.
My guess is that China would back away from a shooting war and the reptiles running the US would like nothing better.
no, I will place my bet that China will go along with whatever the US is pushing until it gets to be unbearable, then maybe they will push back but it would be low key just the same. Perhaps they will do that annoying thing (to westerners anyway) that Chinese are famous for doing, that is to yes us to death.

Posted by: dan of steele | May 30 2009 17:56 utc | 23

@ comment18 – coincidence maybe. That was planned some months ago, I remember reading about it in some Japanese paper (but damn those Japanese news sites; the content vanishes into tin air, or behind a pay wall after a week or so). Unless this was all planned on the US side – tin foil hat mode = on ?
@ comment 22, 23 – of course China will use the economics argument against the US. I doubt they would play it so directly though. That is notthe Chinese (Asian) way. Geithner is supposed to visit Bejing in the next few days. I don’t think he goes empty handed… The Chinese will probably first use the argument as way to pressure the US to the negotiation table. As China_hand notes, the Chinese don’t want a shooting war in their backyard.

Posted by: Philippe | May 31 2009 0:27 utc | 24

I will place my bet that China will go along with whatever the US is pushing until it gets to be unbearable….
With the U.S. running all over Afghanistan and Pakistan, i’d suggest that a war in North Korea would certainly qualify as “unbearable”, from the Chinese perspective.
…then maybe they will push back but it would be low key just the same.j
Wouldn’t economic sanctions be rather low-key? The U.S. would be faced with a dilemma: declaring war against a sovereign nation simply because it decided to call in the debt the U.S. promised to pay up upon, or watching its economy fall apart.
And i’d also add: even if it does possess a juggernaut of a military, against a foe that is allied with Russia, has 1.6 billion people, and is in possession of fully capable space-, aerotech-, missile-, communications- and information-technology, there is no guarantee that the U.S. would win that war.

Posted by: china_hand2 | May 31 2009 4:29 utc | 25

The monitoring results are far from conclusive. There could be other causes of a shallow 4.7 magnitude seismic event in the Korean Peninsula.
See:
http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/north-korea-alternative-theory/

Posted by: Mike Licht | Jun 1 2009 1:46 utc | 26

Back to Main