http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/200505/kt2005050917164110440.htm
US Strike on N. Korea
`Unfeasible'
By Ryu JinStaff Reporter
A military option against
North Korea can be held as a possible card to keep the North from joining the
nuclear club, but it seems impossible at the moment for the United States to
launch a preemptive attack or surgical strike, experts say.
As North Korea
has accelerated its nuclear drive in recent weeks to bring the regional tension
to a peak with its traditional brinkmanship tactics, media outlets have raised
speculations about the possibilities of a nuclear test by the North and a
military campaign by the U.S. to thwart it.
However, without mature
conditions for such an option and due to strong objection by its allies, a U.S.
military campaign remains an unfeasible plan for the time being, officials and
experts said yesterday.
``A military option, in the long term, can be
considered a card,'' Nam Sung-wook, professor of North Korean studies at Korea
University in Seoul, told The Korea Times. ``But, clearly, it's an early card
for now, since there is no mature condition backed by sufficient evidence.''
He added the U.S. will have to take into ``political consideration'' a
counterattack presumed to follow the strike, but it's not a simple problem for
the country at a time when South Korea and China oppose such course of action.
Baek Seung-joo of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA) argued in
an article he contributed to the Defense Policy Review, a quarterly magazine
issued by the state-funded think tank, that it is ``realistically impossible''
to use a military option on the North.
He said a lot of factors should be
taken into account before the worse-case scenario is considered _ from military
capability of the main attacker, legitimacy of the strike and support from
relevant nations to North Korea's retaliation and possible radioactive
contamination.
``A main stumbling block, first of all, would be the
controversy over the legitimacy of the attack which can hardly be given without
a resolution of the U.N. Security Council,'' Baek said, adding it seems unlikely
that South Korea and surrounding powers would endorse the action.
Pyongyang, which has already warned that it
would regard a U.N. referral of its case as a declaration of war, argued that
the ``U.S. is not the sole owner of a preemptive attack'' and
said, although the country doesn't want to wage a war, it won't lose the
opportunity if it is forced to.
American television network NBC said on
Friday the U.S. military has drawn up plans for a possible preemptive attack
against the North should it appear ready to test an atomic weapon. Without
citing sources, however, it added U.S. allies in the region strongly oppose the
military option.
The Pentagon has had B2 stealth bombers and F-15 fighter
jets on alert in the Pacific as part of a contingency plan since September when
an agreed fourth round of six-party talks failed to take place, according to the
report.
Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), warned Friday that a North Korean test blast would be nuclear blackmail,
and world leaders should get on the phone to dissuade Pyongyang from going ahead
with it.
In an interview with CNN, the top nuclear inspector also said that
his agency estimates North Korea has enough plutonium to build ``five or six
weapons'' and has read the country has the ``delivery system.''
What can be
seen as preparations of the North to conduct an underground nuclear test has
been monitored by intelligence agencies, but officials in Seoul as well as
Washington have stressed that it is unclear whether the activity is real or
deceptive.
``We share intelligence with the U.S. and are closely cooperating
with the ally to figure out what the real situation is,'' a South Korean
government official said. ``But, as you know, the North Koreans are letting the
outsiders see what they want them to see.''
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