NORTH KOREA: What If... ...War Breaks Out In

(3 of 4)

So who will prevail? The gloomiest scenario is also the most controversial. The 1991 assessment designed by retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Robert Gaskin predicts the all-important U.S. air campaign would never get off the ground. Instead, he forecasts that when squadrons of American and South Korean F-16s scramble at a dozen air bases, Scud missiles armed with nerve-gas warheads would slam into the tarmac, effectively shutting down operations. At bases like Osan, the huge U.S. air base 25 miles south of Seoul, North Korean commandos would suddenly appear and shoot up the base's preflight briefing room, killing pilots and disrupting the counterattack.

Gaskin's report sees the entire South Korean front crumbling in as few as three days. Never trained to retreat and regroup, the Southern troops would flee in disorganized panic. North Korean armored columns would then envelop Seoul and drive south toward Taejon, a key crossroad, gobbling up captured oil and gasoline supplies along the way and speeding toward Pusan. As the invaders tear through the countryside, Seoul's lightly armed reserve units would fall to North Korea's tanks and armored personnel carriers. Millions of panicked civilians clog the highways, blocking South Korean reinforcements trying to move north. In four weeks, Kim Il Sung's troops would capture Pusan, erasing the mistake their predecessors made 44 years earlier, when Northern forces failed to reach the port before U.S. reinforcements arrived to drive them back across the 38th Parallel.

By Gaskin's lights, President Clinton is left with three bad choices: mount a Normandy-style invasion from the shores of a reluctant Japan; use atomic weapons on Pyongyang, at the cost of countless civilian lives and the peninsula; or simply throw in the towel. Last week Gaskin defended his three- year-old prognostication: "I don't think it's changed much, except at the margins."

"His conclusions are ludicrous," a Pentagon official retorts. This official, who reflects current top-level thinking, is confident that North Korea cannot win. "Our scenarios are profoundly conservative because of the way we vastly overrate the North Korean troops."

The U.S. firmly believes that a lopsided air advantage would more than make up for any mistakes or deficiencies on the ground, an attitude bolstered by the dramatic success of Western air forces in the Gulf War. There is little question that modern U.S. fighters, rapidly brought up to 500, can quickly clear the skies of North Korea's large but obsolescent squadrons of MiG-21 and MiG-17 fighters. B-52s would carpet-bomb Pyongyang's advancing troops 12 hours after they crossed the DMZ. While there are only 72 U.S. F-16s in the South now, warplanes from Japan, Alaska and nearby carriers would arrive within hours of an attack, including the cream of the U.S. arsenal: radar-eluding F- 117A Stealth fighters and F-15E strike jets. The U.S. would also rely on sophisticated radar to pinpoint the enemy's artillery tubes and take them out with artillery salvos.