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In reply to the discussion: How do they expect provoking NK to end? [View all]HAB911
(9,054 posts)casually dropped on recent radio and television news reports, as well as in two separate AOL news op-eds from earlier this year, is that it would be "flattened." Analysis from Time magazine in 2003 went so far as to gauge how long this would take: "Its conventional artillery capability would allow North Korea to flatten Seoul in the first half-hour of any confrontation."
Forget that North Korea would be committing strategic and political suicide with a full-scale bombardment of Seoul. If a storm of artillery rounds fell on Seoul, would the city really disintegrate?
"Artillery is not that lethal," says Anthony Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and is a national security analyst for ABC News. "It takes a long time for it to produce the densities of fire to go beyond terrorism and harassment." Even in a worst-case scenario, where both U.S. and South Korean forces are somehow paralyzed or otherwise engaged, and North Korea fires its 170mm artillery batteries and 240mm rocket launchers with total impunity, the grim reality wouldn't live up to the hype. Buildings would be perforated, fires would inevitably rage and an unknown number of people would die. Seoul would be under siegebut it wouldn't be flattened, destroyed or leveled.
If this sounds like squabbling over semantics, it is. But semantics and language matter. The casual, and largely unsupported references to Seoul's potential flattening punctuates the notion that Kim Jong Il is holding a city hostage. It recasts a complex strategic vulnerability as a cartoon: an entire city facing a perpetual firing squad. It also ignores physical laws, and the realities of modern warfare.
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