What If... ...War Breaks Out In

By Jill Smolowe

In war scenarios, planners tend to anticipate the worst -- ceding infallibility to the enemy's forces and equipment -- or hope for the best, imagining a near perfect performance by their own troops. But these schemes are only guesses. War games cannot calculate what is in the hearts or minds of an enemy force. Will they fight with conviction and tenacity or surrender easily? Will they have enough food, oil and ammunition or leave troops famished and demoralized in the field? Such imponderables, as much as military blueprints, are the true keys to victory.

As the struggle over North Korea's nuclear capability crept a step closer to confrontation last week, men paid to think about the possibility of a war sketched dramatically different scenarios. In the worst case -- a computerized war game done in 1991 by one Pentagon analyst and never officially accepted -- an unstoppable North Korean force sweeps across the 150-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, pushes south through disorganized defenders and reaches the southeastern port of Pusan within four weeks, just in time to block the arrival of U.S. reinforcements. The Korean peninsula reunifies -- with the seat of power in the northern capital of Pyongyang.

In current Pentagon analyses, the North Korean incursion across the DMZ is stopped within three weeks by a superior U.S. air campaign. American troops land at the North Korean port of Wonsan, an Allied noose encircles Pyongyang and topples strongman Kim Il Sung within four months. The Koreas reunite -- with the seat of power in Seoul.

The scenarios share this gloomy prediction: high costs for all sides. Both Koreas would suffer deaths and injuries in the hundreds of thousands, while the U.S. force, which could build to 400,000 over a two-month period, might sustain 20,000 casualties. "It's going to be a bloody, bloody mess if it happens," warns a Pentagon official. "A real tragedy."

Based on what the most pessimistic analysts and current Pentagon planners know about the size and deployment of North Korea's forces and arsenals, and the intent and capability of Allied forces, they agree on this:

-- If a war erupts, it would be because North Korea fires the first shot. / Although the Pentagon steadfastly refused last week to rule out a pre-emptive attack, Washington's actions -- or nonactions -- in South Korea supported the Clinton Administration's stated policy of making no move that might be misinterpreted as a provocation. Even as the war of words quickened, top Pentagon officials saw no reason to evacuate either the 11,000 military dependents of the 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea or the other 12,000 American civilians residing there.

-- Despite U.S. satellites and other intelligence-gathering assets, the warning time of a North Korean attack will be negligible. A year ago, military officials predicted a weeklong alert. General Gary Luck, the senior U.S. commander in South Korea, cautions that his forces will have as little as 12 hours' warning. A congressional defense expert whittles that still lower, predicting that advance notice "is as long as it takes to load and fire an artillery shell: about 10 seconds."

-- The opening barrage of Pyongyang's attack would be one of the largest in modern history. The North will not lack manpower to wage the initial onslaught. More than two-thirds of the 1.2 million-strong army are deployed within 60 miles of the DMZ, amply equipped with tanks, self-propelled artillery and armored personnel carriers to enhance their mobility. "Their heavy firepower, forward deployment and high state of combat readiness constitute a cocked gun pointed at South Korea," says Walter Slocombe, a top Pentagon official.

-- The fighting would be deadly. Nearly 90% of South Korean and U.S. regulars are positioned within 35 miles of the DMZ, in easy range of the North's huge assembly of artillery. U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry acknowledges that its weapons are larger and better than anything owned by Iraq's Saddam Hussein. They include hundreds of 240-mm rocket launchers and 170-mm Koksan guns, among the longest-range artillery weapons in the world. North Korea's 10,000 artillery pieces plus the rocket launchers can fire up to 20 million rounds of high explosives, fuel-air explosives and chemical weapons in a single day. Its 120 Soviet-designed Scud and FROG missiles could sustain an hour-long barrage.

-- The Allies would fight back hard. Their three long, thin lines of defense -- dubbed FEBA (Forward Edge of Battle Area) Alpha, Bravo and Charlie -- are a network of tank traps, fortifications and trenches that mark the front lines as they stood when the first Korean War ended in July 1953. Seoul, which is only 35 miles from the DMZ, has invested heavily in the lines, especially the Alpha line, which crosses the Munsan and Chorwan valleys -- where North Korea would probably push through. Since April, the U.S. has dispatched a battallion's worth of Patriot missiles to South Korea and replaced older Cobra helicopter gunships with new, more potent Apaches. Pentagon officials say all key ports and airfields are being fine-tuned for action. Fuel supplies and depots are being topped off at maximum capacity. The U.S. has withdrawn older iron bombs and replaced them with laser-guided weapons and other "smart bombs" of the kind that performed so well during the Gulf War. But efforts to persuade the South Koreans to redeploy some of their troops away from the DMZ have failed.

During the opening hours of battle, North Korea would have a pronounced edge. After the initial thrust across the DMZ, its forces would head south, with thousands of infantry streaming through the smoking gaps in the South Korean lines ahead of T-62 and T-55 tanks and armored personnel carriers. Commandos and vehicles would move through secret tunnels to sabotage Allied positions from the rear. Over the next days and weeks, North Korea would try to encircle Seoul and gobble up much of the rest of the peninsula before U.S. reinforcements would arrive.

So who will prevail? The gloomiest scenario is also the most controversial. The 1991 assessment designed by retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Robert Gaskin predicts the all-important U.S. air campaign would never get off the ground. Instead, he forecasts that when squadrons of American and South Korean F-16s scramble at a dozen air bases, Scud missiles armed with nerve-gas warheads would slam into the tarmac, effectively shutting down operations. At bases like Osan, the huge U.S. air base 25 miles south of Seoul, North Korean commandos would suddenly appear and shoot up the base's preflight briefing room, killing pilots and disrupting the counterattack.

Gaskin's report sees the entire South Korean front crumbling in as few as three days. Never trained to retreat and regroup, the Southern troops would flee in disorganized panic. North Korean armored columns would then envelop Seoul and drive south toward Taejon, a key crossroad, gobbling up captured oil and gasoline supplies along the way and speeding toward Pusan. As the invaders tear through the countryside, Seoul's lightly armed reserve units would fall to North Korea's tanks and armored personnel carriers. Millions of panicked civilians clog the highways, blocking South Korean reinforcements trying to move north. In four weeks, Kim Il Sung's troops would capture Pusan, erasing the mistake their predecessors made 44 years earlier, when Northern forces failed to reach the port before U.S. reinforcements arrived to drive them back across the 38th Parallel.

By Gaskin's lights, President Clinton is left with three bad choices: mount a Normandy-style invasion from the shores of a reluctant Japan; use atomic weapons on Pyongyang, at the cost of countless civilian lives and the peninsula; or simply throw in the towel. Last week Gaskin defended his three- year-old prognostication: "I don't think it's changed much, except at the margins."

"His conclusions are ludicrous," a Pentagon official retorts. This official, who reflects current top-level thinking, is confident that North Korea cannot win. "Our scenarios are profoundly conservative because of the way we vastly overrate the North Korean troops."

The U.S. firmly believes that a lopsided air advantage would more than make up for any mistakes or deficiencies on the ground, an attitude bolstered by the dramatic success of Western air forces in the Gulf War. There is little question that modern U.S. fighters, rapidly brought up to 500, can quickly clear the skies of North Korea's large but obsolescent squadrons of MiG-21 and MiG-17 fighters. B-52s would carpet-bomb Pyongyang's advancing troops 12 hours after they crossed the DMZ. While there are only 72 U.S. F-16s in the South now, warplanes from Japan, Alaska and nearby carriers would arrive within hours of an attack, including the cream of the U.S. arsenal: radar-eluding F- 117A Stealth fighters and F-15E strike jets. The U.S. would also rely on sophisticated radar to pinpoint the enemy's artillery tubes and take them out with artillery salvos.

Air strikes on Pyongyang might prove trickier. North Korean facilities are heavily defended by antiaircraft guns and long-range SA-5 missiles, with many of those deeply dug into the ground. The most urgent job for aerial forces would be to blunt the North's offensive with antiarmor smart bombs and cluster bombs. Southern airfields have strengthened their defenses, and the arrival of Patriot missiles should help fend off lethal Scuds.

The U.S. has a far better idea of the capabilities of its allies in the South than its enemies to the North. But Washington is in the dark about how % well the North might attack. Virtually all the military analysts studying the battlefront acknowledge that hard information about the quality of Pyongyang's forces is scanty. "Compared to North Korea, the former Soviet Union was a duck-soup intelligence target," notes a Pentagon's analyst. "Here, we just don't know much."

No one is sure if the Northern army has a strategic reserve of petroleum and diesel oil that exempts troops from the severe fuel shortage crippling the rest of the country. Nationwide food shortages and lack of spare parts may cut into the military's muscle. Nor does anyone know whether the North has the means to coordinate a major attack. Its communication systems are primitive, yet the military routinely conducts command-and-control training for large- scale operations.

"The difficulty of the situation is the proximity of the DMZ to Seoul," says retired General Robert RisCassi, who commanded the U.S. forces in South Korea until a year ago. "I truly believe that we would win -- and win handily -- but the cost in terms of civilian lives adds another dimension." Bill Taylor, a retired Army colonel now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, puts it more starkly: "Seoul will be destroyed almost totally in less than a week. That's the rub, and I think everybody knows that."

In the end, acknowledges Eliot Cohen, a war-fighting expert who is frequently consulted by Pentagon officials, "until the shooting starts, nobody really knows what's going to happen." Much depends on the will and determination of the North Koreans. And that is the piece of the puzzle neither Washington nor Pyongyang can calculate with certainty.

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CAPTION: MILITARY BALANCE

With reporting by Edward W. Desmond/Tokyo and Mark Thompson/Washington