Reply With QuoteMight have been true once, but no longer. The window probably passed with the end of the 80s
Good work finding this Ambassador
North Korea Can’t Really Turn Seoul Into a “Sea of Fire”
The analyst used some of Planeman's resources as a reference to expound his view. Like Planeman's own conclusion, he concluded that the legend of 'Sea of Fire', the supposed ability of massed NK artillery (alone) to instantly devastate Seoul at the imminent approach of a war, is largely exaggerated. The real threat from NK is represented by other capabilities such as ballistic missiles.North Korea Can’t Really Turn Seoul Into a “Sea of Fire”
For more than a decade, conventional wisdom has held that North Korea could subject the South Korean capital of Seoul to devastating artillery attack. With a greater metropolitan population of 24,000,000, Seoul has the largest population density of all the OECD countries, eight times more dense than New York City, and three times more dense than Tokyo/Yokohama. Aimed at Seoul, North Korea’s prodigious amount of artillery, particularly its 170mm Koksan guns and 240mm multiple rocket launchers, could kill “millions of people” the event of war on the Korean peninsula.
The “Sea of Fire” scenario first surfaced after the Clinton Administration decided not to attack North Korean nuclear facilities in 1994. Coincidence? Maybe, but since then it’s been used to trump discussion of any military action against North Korea, for whatever reason. Uncertainty about how military action would play out, as well as the North’s unpredictability, means that virtually anything anyone proposed risked the “Sea of Fire”. This haunting scenario has played a role in how policymakers and wonks view engagement with the North.
Is North Korea unpredictable? Yes. Does it have an enormous amount of artillery? Yes. Are many of the artillery pieces in cover? Yes? Could an artillery attack on Seoul kill “millions”? Probably not.
Roger Cavazos, associate analyst at The Nautilus Institute, has released a study on the actual feasibility of the “Sea of Fire”. As Cavazos points out, there are critical questions we should be asking about this apocalyptic scenario. No one doubts that an artillery attack on Seoul is possible, but how quickly could South Korea’s civil defense system protect its people from an artillery attack? Would North Korea execute strictly a countervalue strike against the South, or a mix of counterforce and countervalue? Would North Korea risk killing thousands of Chinese citizens living in South Korea? Can North Korea logistically support such an artillery attack? How quickly would the North’s artillery force be attrited by U.S. / South Korean forces? How many artillery pieces are actually within range of Seoul?
http://asw.newpacificinstitute.org/?p=11355
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?162240-Bluffer-s-Guide-North-Korea-strikes!-%282009%
Might have been true once, but no longer. The window probably passed with the end of the 80s
Good work finding this Ambassador
Well, who needs conventional artillery when North Korea got a nuke or a dirty nuke.
And how will they deploy it? The most they could have by now is a crude air deployed bomb and given the condition of NK airforce it's unlikely they could break through to Seul.
with a missile.Originally Posted by PsihoKeke
They've been testing those - even though it wasn't a great success so far, the tech is there - and according to some thread here on mp.net they've even exported know-how to iran.
And we will watch the missile streak towards our capital on the radar screens with horror and dramatic music playing in the background.
The missile is not the problem (making a big enough missile). The problem to NK is making the bomb small enough. NK has only ancient know-how of light industries and that is why it is struggling to miniaturize a nuke for so many decades even though it had missiles like Nodong (1-ton warhead MRBM) since the 1980s. NK's primary threat is to soft targets, using chemical or biological agents to kill human beings and contaminate water and livestocks.
If NK is going to use very big missiles like Taepodong to equip very big nuclear bombs then they will be very easy to detect and preempt. Taepodong launch sites are huge and in plain sight, and they take many hours to fuel prior to launch. NK doesn't have the solid-fuel MRBM know-how such as Sejjil (with elaborate underground complexes to store missiles such as this) that Iran has.
North Korea's greatest threat and weapon is its alli-errr patron north of the Yalu...
Yep a bit exageratedto instantly devastate Seoul
However (and that is the true issue) a massive barrage of heavy artillery and MLRS on a concentrated urban area will certainly kill or wound hundred if not thousands (chocking the health services), induce a panic and massive evacuation (hindering troop moves and law control) and impact the local (and world) economy.
Urban areas are weak spots and highly vulnerable (hit a single electricty plant and you will cause a huge chaos)
So annihilating Seoul, not, but having devastating effects certainly
The article has very interesting information that provides important glimpse into the NK artillery's true capabilities and limitations. For example, North Korean artillery shells, even at short range, exhibited dud rates of 25% for each shell and rocket that landed in the Yeonpyeong incident (that's not even counting the possible failure rate for artillery that failed to fire correctly in the first place, or shells that fell short of target and into the sea). It empirically shows that NK artillery is (as suspected) qualitatively unreliable. As an additional info not mentioned there, the Koksan guns each fire only one shell per two minutes. This means that NK artillery is also not quantitatively reliable to achieve concentrated effect, in an offensive scenario targeting key Korean population centers. The reason for this is because NK's artillery technology is not advanced enough to achieve either long-range or high-precision, or even mass-producability (without significantly sacrificing reliability, as shown by the dud rates). It results in NK artillery's limited effectiveness to significantly damage Seoul. The North Korean nukes and ICBMs are good examples of NK trying too hard to build weapons that are beyond its manufacturing capabilities, and it's also probably reflected in the manufacturing standard of its artillery.
In my opinion, I think an all-out NK artillery attack on Korea, that was met with any reasonable level of counter-offensive response from the South Korean military, will have similar economic effects to the Japan earthquake and tsunami disaster (a few hours of massive chaos... but quickly receding). It caused considerable local damage, and hurt the economy for some time, very similar to the situation Mordoror outlined. But the country remained stable with solid resolve to recover. Whether you think the disaster was truly 'devastating' is up to your personal standard on what devastation relatively means.
Early ballistic missiles of all nations that produce ballistic missiles were pretty unreliable. The fact that NK's ICBM has been unreliable so far doesn't prove that they are trying to achieve something that above their capability. Same applies to nukes.
Should they continue to pour money into weapons programs while civilians are dying to starvation is completely different question.
Well it doesn't help when your more advanced weaponry is largely built by lifelong slave-prisoners in the gulags to insure they take their secrets with them to the grave
There is one thing that these 'all nations' had that North Korea today does not have in developing their ballistic missiles. It was that all of them had the sustained economic ability to pour significant material and financial resources into their nuclear and ballistic missile programs. There is no question about the economic capacities of countries such as the US and the Soviet Union, and even Pakistan, arguably the nation with potentially the least advanced ballistic missiles and nukes today among nuclear powers, is an economy several ten times bigger than NK, and several times wealthier. So what I think truly limits NK missiles and nukes' developmental potential, by modern standard, is that it has too weak economic and industrial foundation supporting the endeavor. NK's economy is not only very small, but also its growth is nearly non-existent. The future will not bring a lot of improvements to NK nukes' development process, at least in terms of efficiency. It will continue to be a long and tedious endeavor. No matter how skilled NK's scientific personnel are, if they don't have money to work and machines to use, any significant R&D research they'll conduct into advanced systems will quickly stagnate, even if it's not impossible. The great question is what new deterrence and retaliatory capabilities Korea and its alliance will have prepared by the time that NK does have fully functional nukes and ICBMs. For now, though, the only very significant threat to Korea from NK, in macroeconomic terms with long-term implications, are ballistic missiles potentially armed with other forms of massively destructive weapons such as chemical, biological, incendiary, and cluster warheads. Nukes are possibilities that seem safe to be ruled out for the near future.
Yep, NK's desire to keep their population in the dark means they will always have very limited means of producing quality weapons. Someone smart enough to run a CNC machine is smart enough to revolt.
North Korea's so-called "ICBM" just show you how patching several 1950 era soviet scuds together wont give your a ICBM, the same can be said for their nukes, which can only be delievered through trucks.Their main weapons are the 5000 artellaries deploye over the borderline.
Althrough most of N.Korea's war tools can be regarded as 1950-era east bloc relics,S.Korea's weaponaries are not much better either, several recent borderline skirimishes suggesting their so-called "tech" advantage over the 1950 era relics has also been vastly overhyped.
Which kind of making the two koreas more or less evenly matched.
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