North Korea is pushing for a peace treaty with the U.S. in what skeptics call a bid to get the U.S. out of the way so Pyongyang can invade the South. While the conventional wisdom has been that the South would use its superior technology to wipe the floor with the North in any armed conflict, those predictions are overblown. In a worst case scenario, the North would kill civilians in droves and wipe entire neighborhoods in Seoul off the map. While the South would likely ultimately win, it would pay a high price.
North Korea in recent months has ramped up calls for a formal peace treaty with the U.S. in what some experts bill as a bid to get the U.S. out of the way so Pyongyang can roll into Seoul and take over the Peninsula once and for all.
While the North periodically calls for formal relations with the U.S., initiatives usually run out of steam after a while and the isolated state goes back to its regular combination of hurling threats at the U.S. and calling Seoul a puppet of Washington, with the occasional weapons testing.
But this time may be different, as the calls come at a time when there remain questions over whether the young leader Kim Jong-un has solidified his power and when suspicions abound that Kim’s grip on power is weak, leading some to contend that a coup is possible.
“North Korea intends (a peace treaty with the U.S.) to be a path to war,” North Korea expert at the RAND Corporation Bruce Bennett told Borderless News Online.
“North Korea hopes that the United States will make a treaty, then over some years withdraw U.S. forces from South Korea, and then North Korea will have the optimal conditions for invading South Korea,” he said.
While the South has moved on from the 1950s and sees the Korean War as ancient history, for the North it’s very much still alive, and the regime’s propaganda is constantly warning the population to brace itself for war (whether anyone buys that anymore is another story, however).
The conventional wisdom has in recent years been that the Kim regime would be toast in an armed conflict with the South, because of the South’s more modern and technologically advanced military. But there are many reasons to believe that these predictions are overblown at best.
While Seoul has a vast technological edge over North Korea, there are 11,000 artillery tubes pointed at Seoul. While the North may not have the ability to liquidate the entire city, it can kill tens of thousands of civilians and wipe entire neighborhoods off the map.
“South Korea does have some better military technology, but ironically North Korea has some military technology advantages as well,” Bennett said.
“This is particularly true in terms of weapons of mass destruction, but also in terms of systems like the Russian GPS jamming equipment that the North has been periodically testing, “ he said.
“The point with military technology is that comparisons of raw technology level may not be relevant. If South Korea expects GPS guidance of its munitions will give it high precision, and the North Koreans can jam GPS, the outcome may be worse than if South Korea did not have GPS at all,” he said
Moreover, Seoul is a so-called “primate city,” in which the nation’s economy, financial markets and political life is concentrated. No other city in the nation even comes close to Seoul in terms of importance to the economy. A major strike on Seoul would cause the country’s stock market to take a nose dive and would wreck the nation’s economy, causing mass panic and chaos.
The North is a militarized society with an army-first policy – at least in theory. That means the army would not only be fighting to beat the South, it would also fight because the alternative may well be starvation or death by opportunistic diseases for soldiers and their families in the next famine or food shortage.
A highly motivated military is not to be underestimated, as the fanatical ISIS has shown, as the terrorists have held out for more than a year amid a U.S.-led air bombardment.
That said, the exact state of morale in the North Korean army is remains unknown, and there have been reports in recent years of North Korean soldiers who’ve defected and claimed they were not being fed.
There are also questions about how the South Korean army would fare in a fight against North Korea. South Korean children are notoriously out of shape – high schools there emphasize academic achievement over all else and most students don’t play competitive sports – and are known as among the world’s most spoiled children. While many of them do get toughened up in the military, many are starting from a low level of physical strength, stamina and ability (of course, that does not mean that North Korea’s army is not malnourished from lack of food).
Contrast that with the mental toughness of North Koreans, for whom extreme deprivation is a part of everyday live, and it begs the question of how well South Korea’s rank and file would fare against the North. And with only 21.5 months of active duty for conscripts the South Korean army will have some cohesion challenges.
The other challenge is South Korea’s demographic problem that is causing the size of its active-duty army to shrink seriously, coupled with President Park Geun-hye’s commitment to reduce the length of the conscription period.
“Unless some significant actions are taken, the South Korean army in 2026 will be only about half the size it was in 2000,” Bennett said.
No material may be fully re-printed or re-broadcast without the written permission of Borderless News Online.
