War on Korean Peninsula: High Tension Prompts Scenarios

Source: Time

By BILL POWELL – Wed May 26, 1:55 pm ET

"A symphony of death." That's the chilling phrase that Kurt Campbell, who is now Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Obama Administration, once used to describe the likely outcome of any military encounter on the Korean peninsula between the U.S., its ally South Korea and their mutual enemy across the 38th parallel in the North. The possibility of war breaking out once again in Korea is so unthinkable that a lot of people in various military establishments - the Pentagon, South Korea's armed forces and China's People's Liberation Army - actually spend a lot of time thinking about it. The truce between North and South has lasted for 57 years, but a peace treaty has never been signed, and now, in the wake of the North's attack on a South Korean naval vessel - and the South's formal accusation that the Cheonan was sunk by a North Korean torpedo - tensions are at their highest level since 1994, when North Korea threatened to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire."

Seoul has already made it clear that it will not seek military retaliation, and Washington and Beijing have said all the right things about trying to ensure that "cooler heads" prevail, as China's State Councilor, Dai Bingguo, said in talks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Beijing on Tuesday. But all concerned parties understand that at a moment of high tension, the possibility of hot war breaking out is not negligible.

How might a shooting war start? Defense analysts and military sources in Seoul and Washington agree that an outright, all-out attack by either side is unlikely. Even a nuclear armed North, a Seoul-based defense analyst says, "would not risk an all-out war because it would be the end of the regime. Period, full stop." But there are ways in which smaller skirmishes could break out, and if they aren't contained, they could conceivably lead to disaster. Here are three that are uppermost in defense planners' minds:

The West Sea Redux
The site of the crisis - what Koreans call the West Sea (the Yellow Sea to everyone else) - remains the most obvious danger zone. Prior to the March 26 sinking of the Cheonan, there had been three separate naval clashes in the past decade along the so-called Northern Limit Line. The NLL is the de facto boundary that was drawn in 1953 by the head of U.N. forces at the end of the Korean War. Some say the North has never recognized it; others claim that it implicitly did in a 1992 non-aggression pact signed with the South. With the sinking of the Cheonan - an obvious violation of the 1953 armistice - the West Sea is obviously the most sensitive flash point. After the sinking, South Korean President Lee Myung Bak said that North Korean commercial ships - including fishing vessels that hunt for blue crab in the summer months in the South's waters - could no longer venture below the NLL. Pyongyang responded by saying that, likewise, no ships from the South would be welcome north of the NLL. That means all sea-borne traffic from both sides needs to steer clear of the de facto border, lest "they get blown out of the water," says a Western diplomat in Seoul. "That by definition, under these circumstances, is a fraught situation, given that both sides are on a hair trigger now." (See pictures of the rise of Kim Jong Il.)

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Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100526/wl_time/08599199192800

served a year year tour as a Port Service officer on the Korean peninsula a bunch of years ago, glad I'm not there now.