James Barrington - Foxbat

The President stood up and paced back and forth behind his huge desk for a minute or so. He sometimes found that walking helped clarity of thought.

‘Let me just summarize the information I’ve already been given. The North Koreans could invade the South and there wouldn’t be a hell of a lot we could do to stop them. But they don’t have the resources to consolidate their advance, and we’d be able to land enough troops and armour to drive them back within a few weeks. Is that a fair assessment?’

‘Yes, Mr President.’

‘And presumably they know this as well as we do?’

‘I can’t speak for the leadership in Pyongyang, but I think their senior military officers will be aware of the limitations in their supply system, yes.’

‘So let me ask the obvious question. Why would they do it? Why would North Korea consider mounting an invasion that they know must ultimately fail? What’s their objective? And would they use nuclear weapons to achieve it?’

The Secretary of Defense, faced with not one but four ‘obvious questions’, guessed that the one the President really wanted an answer to was the last of them.

‘Frankly, Mr President, I’m not convinced, for several reasons. We know the North Koreans have developed nuclear weapons, because of the underground test they carried out in the fall of 2006. But detonating a small atomic device in some kind of test rig isn’t the same as bolting one to a bus on the top of a missile and dropping a cone over it. The miniaturization process is difficult and complicated, and I still think it’s beyond the North Koreans’ technical competence. The CIA believes they’ve been in contact with Iranian scientists, but it’s not clear who’s advising who, and I still say it’s significant that neither nation has so far demonstrated that they have a long-range nuclear delivery capability.’

‘But you do accept that they possess the raw material to manufacture nuclear weapons?’

The Secretary of Defense nodded. ‘Yes, obviously. All our analyses suggest that the Yongbyon reprocessing plant has been producing weapons-grade fissionable material for some time. We don’t know how much they have, but the IAEA calculated a maximum of about thirty-five kilograms. A twenty-kiloton weapon needs eight kilograms of plutonium, so that suggests they could have manufactured four fairly low-yield devices at the most. They obviously used some of it for the Hamgyeong province tests, so our best guess is they’ve got no more than three functioning devices, and that’s not enough to make a credible threat against South Korea – or anywhere else, for that matter.’

The President sat down again. ‘I hear what you say, and I don’t disagree with your conclusions, but the facts remain. North Korea appears to be planning an incursion across the border. Unless the leadership in Pyongyang has completely flipped, they must have a good reason for doing it, and also be confident they can get away with it. So we’ll work on that premise. First, let’s call the roll. What have we got in South Korea right now?’

The Secretary of Defense settled back in his chair. ‘Militarily, the two countries are unevenly matched in almost every sector.’ And he outlined the discrepancies in their inventories. ‘You should also be aware, sir, that defeating North Korea by military means, if it comes to that, is not going to be an easy option. Before you make any decisions, you need to be fully informed of the likely consequences.

‘The public perception is that North Korea is a grindingly poor country with a starving and dissatisfied population ruled by two psychopaths, one of them now dead.’

This is literally true. Kim Il Sung – the ‘Eternal Leader’ – died in 1994 but is still the official ruler and has, since his death, made no decisions worse than he did during his live tenure. The functional head of state is the ‘Dear Leader’, his son. This scenario led the CIA to describe North Korea’s system of government as the ‘CFC Gambit’ – the acronym standing for ‘crippled, fearsome and crazy’.

‘The reality,’ the Secretary of Defense went on, ‘is somewhat different. The nation is a poor country by Western standards, but the vast majority of the people are unswervingly loyal to their leader, and would happily fight to defend him and their homeland. He almost certainly is a psychopath, and he’s definitely deluded – he claimed not long ago that he’d shot five holes-in-one during a single round of golf, which would make anyone who’s ever picked up a golf club doubt his sanity.’

The President laughed briefly.

‘More seriously, the country’s been in a state of siege ever since the nineteen-fifties, and the bulk of their GNP is spent annually on preparations for war. And, by any standards, they are very well prepared for conflict.

‘Just to give you a few examples: most of their fighter and bomber aircraft aren’t kept in hangars the way ours are. The North Koreans excavate deep into the northern slopes of the mountains, which are mainly granite, and there create huge underground spaces for their aircraft. They choose the north side because our bombs or missiles would have to be dropped or fired from the south, so the bulk of the mountain would be in the way. The rock above the tunnelled-out hangars is far too thick for bunker-busting bombs to penetrate. To be specific, our GBU-28 can cut through twenty feet of reinforced concrete: most of the North Korean bunkers are protected by around two hundred sixty feet of granite.

‘According to the latest estimate, North Korea has well over eight thousand individual underground sites linked by three hundred fifty miles of tunnels. That’s enough to shelter most of their air force from any attack we could launch using conventional weapons. There’s also nothing we could do to cut their lines of communication or to try to decimate their military command structure, because they’re underground as well. One report suggested that their bunkers hold over a million tons of food, one and a half million tons of fuel and nearly two million tons of ammunition and stores. In short, we could launch a massive bombardment of all known North Korean military facilities and achieve virtually nothing in terms of affecting their ability to wage war.

‘Defeating the Iraqis was easy: they had low morale and faced overwhelming odds. The battles took place on almost ideal terrain for our forces – wide open deserts – and we achieved virtually immediate air superiority. North Korea, however, is mountainous, and even if we did gain control of the skies – which is by no means certain – that probably wouldn’t help much. The battles there will be won or lost on the ground.

‘I mentioned their superiority in numbers of tanks. The North Koreans not only have more tanks than our combined forces can field, but most analysts believe they’re better vehicles as well. They’re faster, with thicker armour and more powerful main guns. They’ve also developed tanks specifically for fighting in the hills and valleys of their country. They’re designed to manage better on steep slopes, and they can ford the deepest rivers.

‘And that’s just one way in which the North Koreans have prepared for a war that they’re actually expecting to fight. They’ve also got the biggest special force in the world – about one hundred twenty thousand men. They’ve got twelve thousand anti-aircraft guns, fifteen thousand shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, and about seven hundred high-speed patrol boats, most carrying surface-to-surface missiles, plus long-range anti-ship missiles.

‘Their fighter aircraft are mainly old and slow, but North Korea’s a very small country, and any air battles will be more like Second World War dogfights than the kind of combat our pilots are generally trained for. There just won’t be the opportunities for our guys to engage targets at long and medium range, because the North Korean aircraft will pop up from behind a mountain, fire a salvo and drop down again. The air war will be messy and fought at very close quarters, which is exactly how their pilots have been trained to fight.