Rogue Regime: Excerpt

The following excerpt is from Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea, by Jasper Becker. Rogue Regime looks at the nightmare that is the reign of Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea. Below we have excerpted the introduction to the book. In this piece, Becker imagines what a war with North Korea would be like. This fictional account of a stand-off between the United States and North Korea is truely frightening.

Rogue states are clearly the most likely sources of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons for terrorists. Every nation now knows that we cannot accept—and we will not accept—states that harbor, finance, train, or equip the agents of terror. Those nations that violate this principle will be regarded as hostile regimes. They have been warned, they are being watched, and they will be held to account.
—President George W. Bush addressing cadets at The Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina, December 11, 2001

The fictional scenario that follows is based on the notion that one day the United States might launch an attack in order to enforce international law and prevent North Korea from acquiring, selling, and using its weapons of mass destruction. This very nearly happened in 1994, and as President George Bush warned in 2001, this remains a possibility…This fictionalized account is a stark reminder of the possible consequences of failing to rein in a rogue leader who might possess and be willing to use their nuclear capabilities.

Midnight passed and just minutes after Pyongyang failed to respond to the final ultimatum, dozens of USAF F-117 stealth fighter-bombers crossed into North Korea’s airspace. Captain Robert Green of the U.S. 7th Air Force Division briefly glanced at the landscape below as the plane banked and noticed how the glittering lights from the prosperous cities and roads of South Korea had disappeared. Below, North Korea lay shrouded in darkness.

Nothing gave away the position of its cities, towns, and ports, apart from a faint glow hinting at the capital Pyongyang, not far from the east coast. What was happening down there, he wondered? Was the entire population assembled in bunkers and shelters? Was the million-strong army braced and waiting?

His plane passed the North’s capital, and now the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon lay only 60 miles ahead. Within minutes he would release the bombs at the half-finished 200-megawatt reactor at Taechong. This was the moment of no return. Other members on the mission would target the Hysean Chemical Factory on Yanggang-do, the February 8th Vinalon Complex in Hamhung, and the Sakchu Chemical Weapons Factory on the border with China. There were hundreds of targets in the first wave of strikes…Within the next five hours, the USAF would drop thousands of JDAMs, twin blast munitions designed to penetrate reinforced bunkers and tunnels.The effectiveness of the latest generation of satellite-guided smart bombs would be severely tested against a country that had buried their entire military and civilian infrastructure deep underground. Only the high intensity, heat-generating bombs, BLU 118Bs, could hope to damage factories hidden in caverns excavated far into the mountains of this rugged peninsula…

On the stealth bomber, Captain Robert Green’s mission was over, and any second now, he expected the sky over Korea to burst into light as a blaze of antiaircraft shells and searchlights opened up. The North Koreans had one of the largest air defense systems in the world, and although much of the technology was dated, the North Koreans could put up a much tougher defense than the Serbs or Iraqis had been able to mount against a similar onslaught. But he and the other pilots had been rehearsing such missions since 1989, when Washington first discovered that North Korea was secretly reprocessing spent plutonium rods from an experimental reactor built with Soviet help in the 1980s.
The strike had been called off after President Carter had gone to Pyongyang and personally negotiated an agreement. Now there was new evidence that North Korea had flouted its promises and posed a larger threat than ever before. At the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s base in Pearl Harbor, naval planners had no doubt that the U.S. 7th Air Force Division could strike the targets, but Green wondered what exactly they would be destroying. Just how good was the CIA’s intelligence?

…On the bridge of the USS Kitty Hawk , Admiral Peter Grey watched the F-17 planes taking off and hoped that one them would be lucky enough to catch Kim Jong Il, kill him, and quickly bring the crisis to an end. But this would require more than luck. Divine intervention was needed. Kim was forewarned and forearmed. Washington and Seoul had been warning him for months that if he refused to agree to terms of “complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of his nuclear programs,” he would face “serious” consequences.

Kim Jong Il had replied with a blast of bombastic defiance. Perhaps he did not have the stomach for a real war, or perhaps he was sure the Americans did not either. He had threatened huge American casualties if attacked.

To be sure, it helped him to cultivate an image of irrationality and violence, but the short, pudgy, cognac-swilling Kim Jong Il was no one’s idea of a fighting general. Still, Grey mused, the United States had less reliable intelligence about North Korea than any other country. No leader moved in greater secrecy than Kim Jong Il, who feared his own people as much as he feared his enemies abroad.

…Once the first wave of aerial and cruise missile sorties had taken out the nuclear and chemical weapons sites, within hours a second wave would be smashing the North’s air defense system. Then the North’s long-range artillery and bombers would be hit with terrifying accuracy. The entrances of the hardened sites in which the North’s artillery were sheltered would be buried beneath a pile of rocks so that the guns would never be pulled out and allowed to fire.

The North’s chemical warfare capabilities, however, greatly worried Paek. It would only take a few shells to wreak enormous destruction on the civilian population. One battery of the 240-mm MRLs could deliver roughly a ton of chemical weapons. The North had the ability to produce bulk quantities of nerve, blister, choking, and blood agents, using its sizeable, although aging, chemical industry. North Korea had filled shells with mustard, phosgene, sarin, and V-type chemical agents. Its factories could produce 4,500 tons per year, perhaps 12,000 tons in a war. The aerial sorties aimed to destroy 12 known chemical weapon facilities and the 6 major storage depots, but who knew what else had been hidden?

…General Black looked again at TV screens to check if the presidential broadcast had started, but CNN was still previewing the day’s Wall Street earnings. If it did come to war, and Kim’s bluff was called, he wondered how the U.S. troops would perform. When the North Korean infantry surged across the border, they would come in human waves, imbued with a fanatical willingness to die for their Great Leader. Indoctrinated since the cradle to hate Americans, and put through an eight-year military service, they were nothing like his own men, rotated through for less than a year on average. His men did not know the terrain, their host country, or their mission.

On the other hand, the North Koreans were shorter, much shorter. The minimum height requirement had to be lowered to 162 cm after years of half rations, and at an average of 90 pounds, some of them weighed half what his men did. Yet, they had been in a state of almost continuous war readiness. And he also had doubts about the morale of the South Korean troops. He knew they were fit, strong, and well-educated, but this was after all a conscript army, not a professional force, and many younger South Koreans were psychologically unprepared to fight against the North.

His musings were interrupted, as the American president came on air, sitting at his desk in the White House and looking solemn. He revealed that the first wave of planes had accomplished their sorties successfully. “I will not tell you that destroying North Korea’s nuclear ambitions will be simple or without risk. North Korea already possesses a large inventory of weapons of mass destruction including chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. We estimate that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea already has obtained enough weapons-grade plutonium to build six nuclear weapons. If we fail to act now, the security of East Asia, which accounts for 40 percent of the world’s trade, cannot be guaranteed. The UN Security Council’s edicts have been flaunted for over 15 years. And my fellow Americans, even in the United States we will not be safe from nuclear blackmail by this rogue state.”

….If Kim launched a rocket carrying a nuclear bomb, there would easily be 70,000 dead and 75,000 injured, just as at Hiroshima. Or if his Special Forces sprayed only a few kilograms of anthrax in Seoul, tens to hundreds of thousands of people would be infected and many of them would die unless properly treated. Plus, Kim might have sleeper agents in the South or in Japan or the United States ready to launch terrorist operations that no one was anticipating.

An hour had gone by since the stealth planes had delivered the first strikes. So far nothing had happened. The atmosphere in the control room remained subdued. “The entire North Korean war machine seems paralyzed,” General Paek observed to himself. Until Kim Jong Il, as the chairman of the National Defense Committee (NDC), issued his orders, no one else would dare act on his own initiative. This committee was the most powerful body in the country and exerted complete control over both the economy and the military. Not even a battalion commander could move his men without first seeking Kim’s personal approval. All key information would first be passed to Kim. So compartmentalized and secretive was the North Korean system of government that information about the first wave of attacks could not possibly spread through the system. So, if Kim were in one of his many presidential palaces, drunk or simply asleep, nobody would know what to do. If he was already dead, it would take days before one of his sons or generals would dare assume power.

Yet once rumors did start to fly, Kim Jong Il might not be able to rely on the loyalty of most of his people. They had endured 15 years of starvation and false promises, and Kim was deeply hated. General Paek doubted that Kim could really rally the country behind a prolonged “people’s war,” especially one that the KPA was clearly losing. How many truly believed in Kim, even in his inner circle, he wondered. And did they really still believe the propaganda that told them that life in the South was a living hell?

As Paek ran through these familiar thoughts, the control suddenly buzzed with excitement and General Black turned and said tersely, “We’ve spotted a ballistic rocket launch—a Taepo Dong 2—there on the screen—we have just five minutes to shoot it down.”