John Allen and Michael O'Hanlon
The United States and South Korea are increasingly in a mutual-hostage relationship with North Korea. It is important that President Donald Trump bear this fact in mind as he addresses the acute crisis on the peninsula; fundamentally, there are no great military options today, and a combination of economic sanctions with diplomacy offers the best hope of addressing the situation. However, over time new technologies could change that situation in the allies’ favor, and we need to get on with pursuing them as a way of gaining leverage against the North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un.
The current military situation is roughly as follows. America’s mid-course missile interceptors based in Alaska and California may be enough to provide us credible options to address possible North Korean missile attacks on the U.S. homeland. Other missile-defense systems, such as the land-based THAAD capability, and the U.S. Navy’s Standard Missiles guided by Aegis radars on surface ships, can plausibly protect Guam, Japan and southern areas of South Korea—such as the key logistics port of Pusan—reasonably well. But Seoul is inherently vulnerable. That city, including the broader metropolitan area that spans from Inchon in the west all the way to the capital's downtown and beyond, contains 25 million people—half of South Korea's population. It is vulnerable to short-range missile strikes from systems that could carry conventional or perhaps nuclear weapons. It is also vulnerable to barrage from several thousand North Korean artillery tubes, many of which can be rolled out of mountain redoubts and then wheeled back to cover after firing their initial shots. It is largely for these reasons that Pentagon models estimate that any war on the Korean Peninsula would likely cause hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, even as it inevitably resulted in the complete demise of the North Korean regime.
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/these-two-technologies-could-give-the-allies-edge-the-korean-22543
