By BOB BUTTERWORTH
Preparing for war can sometimes help prevent one, and those preparations are probably helpful if one does start. Perhaps it’s time to show North Korea what its forces would be in for, and to show our allies in the South that we are with them, seriously.
The best course may be through field exercises conducted jointly by US and South Korean conventional forces, demonstrating operational capabilities to be used in the face of nuclear strikes.
Often a second Korean War is imagined to end with US nuclear weapons destroying the North. True, this year United States has twice flown bombers over South Korea, perhaps to make sure that Kim remembers we have them. But it seems improbable that the US would use nuclear weapons in a war against the North, even if Kim Jong Un started the war by using atomic bombs.
The reason has little to do with postulated norms or taboos or risks of escalation. It’s just that we might well find there is nothing in our arsenal that is militarily appropriate. Presumably, we would want weapons with low yield, minimally persistent radiation, and enhanced electromagnetic effects, and that are targetable with tactical precision. The best available option in the near term would be a low-yield B61-12 delivered by a bomber, but radiation levels of the wrong kind could prove higher than desired. And if North Korea had some advanced Russian air defense systems, we might lose some pilots and aircraft.
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