There are no attractive military options for the United States when it comes to North Korea, experts say, because Pyongyang has massive firepower trained on its neighbor and because the regime can easily conceal its nuclear weapons as well as other elements of its program.

With an army of more than a million troops and a vast arsenal of artillery and missiles pointed at South Korea as well as Japan, North Korea could exact untold bloodshed for a preemptive strike against its nuclear weapons sites.

Casualties would number in the hundreds of thousands, possibly within the first days of a war, experts say.

"If there were to be a full-scale war, the casualties would be unimaginable," said Chaibong Hahm, senior political scientist at the California-based RAND Corporation.

"Ultimately there's absolutely no doubt in anybody's mind the combined US and South Korean forces would prevail. But at what cost is a serious question," he told AFP.

A war game conducted by former senior US officials in 2005 for The Atlantic magazine had a conservative estimate of 100,000 casualties, assuming American air power could take out missiles and artillery at the outset at a rate of 4,000 sorties a day.

Former US president Bill Clinton seriously considered a preemptive strike against North Korea's reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, ex-officials have since revealed. But a diplomatic breakthrough by another former American president, Jimmy Carter, defused the crisis.

Since then, North Korea's nuclear program has progressed under a veil of secrecy, making a preemptive attack much more difficult. The outside world can only guess where Pyongyang's weapons or suspected uranium enrichment sites are hidden, analysts say.

US aircraft probably would be able to disable plutonium production and reprocessing facilities with precision raids, but atomic bombs could be hidden in the regime's network of caves and tunnels.

"We don't know where the existing nuclear weapons are," said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

A failed preemptive strike could lead to nightmare scenarios ranging from North Korea detonating nuclear weapons or launching chemical or biological assaults.

During annual exercises with South Korea this year, US special forces conducted a mock operation against a fictional "chemical weapons lab" while medical teams practiced treating casualties from a chemical attack.

The United States has reduced its force in South Korea but still has 28,500 troops there, along with tens of thousands in Japan, and missile defense weaponry on land and at sea designed to intercept North Korean missile attacks.

But with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington would be hard pressed to come up with the large-scale force some military planners say would be necessary in the event of a full-blown conflict with North Korea.

Instead of bombing raids against nuclear targets, another option would be a strict naval blockade to seal off North Korean ports and possibly break the back of the regime.

US and South Korean naval power would easily defeat Pyongyang's ships and submarines, but such a move would carry the same risk of massive retaliation on land and a slide into all-out war, analysts say.

The dismal scenarios do not end with appalling casualties or nuclear warfare.

The possible fall of the North Korean regime in any war would trigger new dangers, with weapons of mass destruction up for grabs and a stream of impoverished humanity fleeing south.

Author Robert Kaplan wrote on The Atlantic magazine's website that "anyone who talks breezily about 'helping' North Korea to collapse has simply not learned the lesson of Iraq: The only thing worse than a totalitarian state is no state at all."

earlier related report
US should consider military options against N Korea: Perry
The United States should consider a range of coercive measures against North Korea, including possible military action, for diplomacy to have a chance of success, former US defense secretary William Perry said Thursday.

Perry emphasized that he was not recommending military action against North Korea now but said the United States should at least consider escalating to military action if other lesser coercive measures prove ineffective.

"We could have stopped this last nuclear test if we had chosen to do so. We could have stopped the first one had we chosen to do so," he told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"That requires a military action, and I'm not recommending military action. But somewhere along in this series of coercive actions, one can imagine an escalation, and if the ones that are less do not succeed, we have to be willing to consider the other ones," he said.

He noted that North Korea has not yet tested a missile with a nuclear weapon, a difficult technical achievement, and said preemptive strikes to stop such tests was another option that could be considered.

Perry served as defense secretary from 1994-96 during a similar confrontation with North Korea that ended in the first nuclear disarmament accord with North Korea in 1994, only narrowly avoiding US military action.

Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser and Perry's co-chair in a study on US nuclear policy, said he agreed with Perry, but cautioned that the use of force was fraught with the risk of unintended consequences.

"When you get in trouble force looks like a clean way to cut through all the fog and resolve the problem," he said. "But the use of force creates a new environment, and the problem is nothing is the same at the end as it was in the beginning."

In a question and answer session, Perry said the US approach toward North Korea in the six party talks had failed, and there could be no return to business as usual.

"Having said that, I do believe that diplomacy still has a chance of success, but only if it is robust and only if its robustness includes some meaningful coercion on opponents," he said.

"I recognize that diplomacy has a much steeper hill to climb now than it did in 2003 because they now have a bomb," he said, referring to the last crisis with North Korea.

"Then we had the option of stopping the production of plutonium. Now the plutonium has been produced and it is located somewhere we know not where. So that option has now disappeared," he said.

But he said the United States should not accept a nuclear armed North Korea.

He said the United States needs to hear an "an unambiguous and clear condemnation" of North Korea by the UN Security Council, and that any rebuke had to be more than "an exercise in words."

"What are the coercive elements we need to consider? It seems to me the one that is the most immediate, and with real bite to it is stopping the money transactions of the North Korean leadership," he said.

"But when I say 'we' I don't mean the US alone. This has to be an international effort," he said.

"If that is not sufficient, and it probably will not be, then we need to consider some stronger measures," he said. "We're discussing already stopping the transfer of nuclear related material and equipment from North Korea."

He acknowledged such a move would be dangerous but said the risks had to be balanced against those associated with allowing North Korea to proceed with its nuclear program.

North Korea has said it would respond to any attempt to board its ships with military strikes on South Korea.

Both Perry and Scrowcroft said China's support would be key if sanctions against North Korea were to be effective.

Scowcroft said the latest nuclear test appears to have settled a debate as to whether North Korea's goal was to become a nuclear state, or trade its nuclear program for economic benefits and security guarantees.

"Now it looks like that is becoming clearer, and their goal is to become a nuclear weapons state. I think that makes a big difference in the Chinese attitude, for example," he said.

"I think there is the possibility now with some skillful diplomacy to exercise one or more, several of the options that Bill Perry has recommended," he said.

"We now have a new situation that has not appeared before, and it seems clear to me that we now have additional leverage and reason to expect from our friends in the five, or six party talks," he said.

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