How visions of war could keep peace between U.S. and North Korea

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More than 30 times in the past quarter-century, retired U.S. Air Force colonel Sam Gardiner has plotted the arc of war as it might take place in North Korea. Sometimes in this exercise, the first move comes from the United States, which fires volleys of cruise missiles to devastate the rogue state's nuclear facilities. Bombs land on places believed to hide long-range missiles deep below the earth.

And then, for a short period, quiet. North Korea does not immediately strike back.

The reason soon becomes clear, when thousands of North Korean special-operations forces secreted into South Korea begin to unleash devastation, attacking air bases with sarin gas and kidnapping high-level officials. At the same time, the line of North Korean artillery aimed at Seoul booms into action, filling the air with shells. Many of them are stuffed with chemical weapons and the effect is devastating.

"We could see three to four million casualties in the Seoul area," said Mr. Gardiner, who held senior faculty positions at the Naval War College and National War College. Tens of thousands of them are Americans, including military officers and families.

A decade ago, the death toll in such a scenario from chemical weapons alone was estimated at one million. The real-world experience of Syria has led experts to triple that. They must also now account for a few dozen nuclear weapons that did not previously exist.

What it means is that these days, no matter how Mr. Gardiner runs North Korea war-game exercises, they end the same way: "Essentially, the answer is, it gets so serious we don't want to go there," he said.

"It's what we learned from the Cold War: Nuclear weapons can have a stabilizing effect. We can't do anything and the North Koreans can't do anything," he said. "Military options no longer make sense."

A staggering disparity in raw killing ability separates the world's mightiest armed power from a country whose stealth aircraft is a 1940s-era biplane built with wood to evade radar.

North Korea's "actions will continue to be grossly overmatched by ours and would lose any arms race or conflict it initiates," U.S. Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis said this week. President Donald Trump on Thursday added that if North Korea attacks the United States or an ally, "things will happen to them like they never thought possible."

In technological terms, U.S. military superiority is overwhelming to the point of absurdity. North Korea's entire defence budget is believed to be a fraction of what the U.S. military spends on gas and jet fuel alone.

But as Mr. Gardiner's scenarios have shown, the U.S. ability to quickly and decisively win a war is questionable – and North Korea's capacity to draw blood from any attacker makes it a more formidable adversary than numbers alone might suggest.

The U.S. government is far from blind to this. "We carefully studied this contingency. 'Preventive war' would result in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of casualties," Susan Rice, former national-security adviser to Barack Obama, wrote in The New York Times on Thursday.

A "United States decision to start a pre-emptive war on the Korean Peninsula, in the absence of an imminent threat, would be lunacy."

But successive U.S. administrations have also underestimated the country – and nowhere could such a mistake be more dangerous than in the case of military conflict.

Take the isolated regime's willingness to endure staggering human and economic losses that, in the event of military conflict, would likely far outstrip what any other country would be prepared to endure.

Those who have spent time in North Korea describe it as a "religious state," animated by a profound reverence for the ruling Kim family – and in particular the heavily indoctrinated military.

"They are willing to take losses like no army in the world," said one Western analyst who has travelled extensively through North Korea, and spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of those travels.

That prospect has stoked fears that a White House that dwells on military options courts catastrophe.

Few doubt that the United States has the power to ultimately come out the victor in a shooting war.

"But victor of what, exactly? If that potentially means Seoul is extremely heavily damaged, missile strikes possibly on Japan – and North Korea is a smoking hole in the ground – then clearly that's not a victory that suits anyone's long-term interests," said Euan Graham, who tracks east Asian security issues as director of the international-security program at the Lowy Institute in Sydney.

There is little doubt, too, that North Korea has come to a similar conclusion about the consequences of attacking the United States, particularly with a nuclear weapon.

"They know that would be suicide," said Jean H. Lee, a global fellow with the Wilson Center, who is former Pyongyang Bureau Chief for the Associated Press.

"The whole point of a nuclear program is to keep the country intact. They're not going to use it to destroy themselves," she said.

That means logic should dictate that the extraordinary rhetoric employed by Washington and Pyongyang in recent days – with Mr. Trump threatening to rain down "fire and fury," and North Korea warning it is drawing plans to shoot four intercontinental ballistic missiles over Japan as an "enveloping strike" that would splash down 30 to 40 kilometres from the shores of Guam – will lead to no major confrontation.

North Korea's leadership knows that "if there was to be warfare, the regime would be finished. So that's the last thing they want," said Mike Breen, the author of a biography on Kim Jong-il, father of the current North Korean leader.

"If there were any serious move on the American side toward some kind of military strike, I think the North Koreans would back off really quickly, and in a very visible way."

"Nobody wants to go to war," Ms. Lee added. "So what we're trying to calculate is how much is Donald Trump bluffing and how much are the North Koreans bluffing – and how do they back down from this."