Girding for 'Implosion'
North Korea may be collapsing. The risk of conflict isn't
SEOUL--The autumn night is calm and pleasant, except where some soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry regiment are standing. On an airfield about 20 miles south of the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea, the soldiers cling to the tops of humvees being rocked by hurricane-level winds from the rotors of Chinook helicopters overhead. As the 25-ton choppers--operating with lights out, as in combat--maneuver to within inches of their heads, the soldiers bob and lunge until they hook the humvees to the choppers with thick ropes.
The pilots then use night-vision goggles to ferry their cargo through the dark to a gap in the hills 10 miles away, where the battalion's D company rehearses a nighttime air assault against an "opposing force" of fellow Americans portraying North Korean invaders. With the real enemy poised just over the horizon, there's no lack of enthusiasm. "We're ready to blast [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Il and his Communist heathens back into the Stone Age," exclaims Lt. Col. Mark Milley, the bombastic battalion commander.
Such war-whooping and hard-core training have long been the norm on the Korean peninsula, where 37,000 of America's most combat-ready troops and their nearly 700,000 colleagues in South Korean uniforms prepare daily to defend against a North Korean invasion.
Hard landings. But with the north's old Communist allies defunct or preoccupied and its economy sinking into seemingly irreversible decline, many analysts now think North Korea will "implode" before it ever invades the south. Some diplomats have been speaking optimistically of a "soft landing" in which the north liberalizes its tenaciously anticapitalist policies and opens itself to external influence. As intelligence experts try to penetrate the thick fog of mystery that surrounds the unpredictable and isolated regime of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, however, second thoughts are increasingly coming to the fore. The more U.S. and Korean military officials analyze the "implosion scenario," the less it looks like a quick ticket home for front-line troops like Colonel Milley's. While the conventional scenario of North Korea's launching an "invasion of Communist conquest" may be growing remote, many increasingly plausible scenarios could still involve U.S. troops in serious fighting. Collapse at best will produce a huge humanitarian crisis, at worst trigger all-out combat.
"One can no longer separate collapse from war," says a U.S. military planner in Seoul. "There will be plenty of hardness to go through to get to a soft landing." If war breaks out, plans call for roughly half of America's total air, sea, and ground combat forces to deploy to the region. Thousands of casualties would be expected.
Predicting how and when a state will fail is an inexact science. "Many would like to put a time line on it," says Gen. John Tilelli, the top U.S. and United Nations commander in South Korea. "That's frivolous." Yet all of the signs point to a North Korean regime well on its way to collapse. The north has few trading partners, and its gross domestic product has fallen by more than 30 percent since 1991. Factories produce perhaps 10 percent of their capacity and are being dismantled and sold for scrap. Years of poor farming practices, combined with floods and droughts, may already have caused tens of thousands of famine deaths, with conditions likely to worsen indefinitely. Food must be transported surreptitiously, to prevent food riots. Even the military--which, as Kim's top priority, consumes more than one fourth of the state's GNP--is so short of food and fuel that training has been seriously curtailed. Shortages have spawned black markets and illegal trade along the Chinese border--signs that people are trying to survive through means other than the north's tightly controlled command economy.
The peaceful transition some other Communist states have navigated seems unlikely in North Korea. Economic reform means opening the borders to foreign trade and investment, and open borders would mean exposing North Koreans to the knowledge of how pitiful their living conditions are compared with the rest of the world--and with South Korea in particular, where per capita GNP is more than 10 times that of the north. "Loosening up means the big lie is exposed," says a U.S. intelligence officer in South Korea.
By the book. The suffering and hardship that have struck North Korea so far roughly coincide with the first several phases of collapse outlined in a research paper written by Bob Collins, a member of the U.S. military planning staff in Seoul. Military commanders are using the paper as an informal guide for analyzing events in North Korea.
So far, widespread hardship has not translated into organized resistance to the government. "Nobody is blaming Kim for the country's problems," says the U.S. intelligence officer. "That worries us a little. It's not what we'd expect." At some hard-to-predict point, however, the Collins paper predicts that resistance will finally erupt if the downward spiral continues, testing the ability of North Korea's five KGB-like security organizations to suppress it. Opposition could quickly gain the support of key government and military officials. That would lead to the final two phases of collapse: fracture of the regime and some kind of realignment of the government in which Kim and many of his handpicked lieutenants would be purged. This endgame will be "difficult without an extreme amount of violence," argues Collins. At some point, military units would be sent into action against fellow citizens--and against each other, as the crisis degenerated into civil war.
The outbreak of civil war in North Korea could hasten the end of the oppressive Kim government. But to military strategists, it is a powder keg of potentialities. The north's huge inventory of chemical weapons and perhaps one or two nuclear bombs could fall into unknown hands. If not used, they could be sold for ready cash to international terrorists.
As civil war erupted, some troops along the demilitarized zone would almost certainly try to escape into the south. If they fled in large numbers, their commanders--probably under threat of execution for allowing mass defections--might be forced to call for artillery fire to head them off. To the South Korean troops dug in at the border, a horde of rampaging northerners backed by exploding artillery would look a lot like an invasion, possibly prompting return fire--and the possible outbreak of the Second Korean War. Defense officials particularly worry that the north's withdrawal in 1994 from official military-to-military dialogue leaves no forum to resolve misunderstandings.
If Kim's control of the military begins to slip, he may choose another and far more desperate path: a pre-emptive attack on the south in a last-ditch effort to hold on to his one bargaining chip with the world, his Army of 1.2 million. A strike against the south in these circumstances would probably be calculated to focus his forces on external rather than internal enemies. While such a move might seem suicidal, one military official in South Korea points out that Iraq's Saddam Hussein survived the gulf war--a conflict North Korea has studied intently. North Korea's 10,000 artillery pieces and huge special operations force would very likely achieve widespread destruction before U.S. and South Korean forces brought them to heel.
Peace is hell. Those are worst-case scenarios being evaluated by military planners paid to prepare for catastrophe. But even optimistic scenarios contain troubling implications that South Koreans have yet to come to terms with. If north and south were to reunite peacefully, that would most likely set millions of refugees flowing south in search of food. The south could try to regulate the flow, but "it is hard to imagine gradual integration, when any Korean can claim Republic of Korea citizenship," says Nicholas Eberstadt, a Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. U.S. commanders in Korea say responsibility for humanitarian aid would fall to South Korean forces and private aid groups, though they acknowledge the inevitable involvement of U.S. troops to provide logistical support. One American analyst in Seoul says the South Koreans "have not devoted much attention to what's going to happen"--which means U.S. troops could get more involved in a humanitarian crisis than anticipated.
Then there is the financial cost of a reunified Korea, which almost makes the perpetuation of the 44-year hostile standoff seem desirable. Marcus Noland of the Institute for International Economics estimates that reunification could cost $1 trillion, nearly twice the south's annual economic output--"a figure so large as to be infeasible," he wrote in a recent article in Foreign Affairs. Even with generous foreign aid, that would entail severe new taxes and hardships for South Koreans just becoming accustomed to prosperity.
To grasp the financial implications of reunification, South Korean officials have begun to analyze the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, which caused serious strains even though it took place under much more favorable circumstances. East Germany had only one fourth the population of West Germany, whereas North Korea's population is half that of the south. West Germany was a wealthier country than South Korea, and East Germany's infrastructure was not a shambles, as North Korea's is.
Instead of dealing with the messy and costly aftermath of North Korea's collapse, Noland suggests, it may actually be in the south's interest to extend life support to its cross-border foe by encouraging foreign investment there and by discouraging or even prohibiting North Koreans from coming south.
"Four-party" talks between the two Koreas, China, and the United States are aimed at negotiating a peaceful end to the Korean stalemate, but the talks, which nominally began this summer, have already bogged down over North Korean objections to the agenda for the discussions. No new meetings are likely until sometime next year.
Meanwhile, other events could intervene. Kim could be assassinated or flee the country, although intelligence officials don't know of any backup plan for exile abroad. Or, Kim's ruling body could muddle along indefinitely--even as the population sinks ever deeper into famine and misery.
[Map is not available.] State of collapse North Korea's sinking economy could be the spark that ignites war.
GDP growth rates: -3.7 percent GNP per capita: $910 Defense spending: 27 percent of GNP Population: 23.5 million
GDP growth rate: 7.1 percent GNP per capita: $10,548 Defense spending: 3 percent of GNP Population: 45.7 million
Source: Republic of Korea embassy, Bank of Korea, International Institute for Strategic Studies
CULT LEADER Rare white sea cucumber heralds Dear Leader Isolated for half a century, North Korea has managed to nurture and preserve a cult of personality around its leaders as no other nation in recent times. Here are some reports of the many and varied accomplishments of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il from North Korea's official news services:
Sept. 22, 1997: "Fishermen . . . caught a 10-centimeter-long white sea cucumber while fishing . . . off Chongjin. They said the rare white sea cucumber has come to hail the auspicious event of electing comrade Kim Jong Il as party general secretary."
May 7, 1997: "Kim Jong Il is the savior of present-day human music, who opened a new epoch of music. . . . He is a great teacher of music . . . and a rare great statesman who paves the glorious way for the cause of independence by making use of music as an almighty weapon."
March 21, 1997: Visit to an Army outpost on Cho Island: "After mounting a forward command post, exposed to rain and wind, [Kim] stood by a map of operations when the black rain cloud cleared and bright sun rays spread. People say that even heaven ensures the personal safety of Gen. Kim Jong Il, working mysterious wonders."
March 22, 1996: Kim Jong Il "is energetically working round the clock. It was on the early morning of the New Year day of 1976. An official, worried about Kim Jong Il's health, entered his office and earnestly hoped he would take even a few hours of rest. But Kim Jong Il said: 'If a locomotive pauses, its cars also stand still. If our party, the locomotive of the revolution, stops . . . it will delay the revolution.' Then he continued working in his office."
Jan. 25, 1996: "Kim Jong Il is a great maker of witty remarks: 'Trust produces loyal subjects, but doubt produces traitors,' 'Those who love the future have nothing impossible to do.' These remarks become policies and strategies for all domains such as building the party, the state, the Army, the economy and culture, and even ethical problems in everyday life. Fully reflected in the remarks are his clairvoyant wisdom, sound judgment, extensive knowledge, manifold attainments, rich experiences, and skillful linguistic ability."
This story appears in the October 27, 1997 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.