Count Chocula wrote:]It fell through because South Korea's economic and defense center is Seoul, regardless of the factory locations of Hyundai, Kia and LG. If I recall correctly, we still have 30,000 US troops stationed on the North Korea/South Korea border as well, since the US is still at war with North Korea (albeit in a state of armistice), and it just wouldn't be cricket to leave those troops as a firebreak without something - like the seat of government - to stiffen their spines!
All US troops are gone from the boarder, we shifted them all well south and out of range of artillery fire several years ago.
In addition, if the North Korean Army does break through the border it'll march straight for Seoul regardless of the government's location, and once they're through the South Korean government becomes immaterial until the North Koreans are driven back and defeated.
Breakthrough is relative, the North Koreans easily still overrun the main line of resistance a couple kilometers south of the DMZ, but they’d just keep hitting line after line of defenses behind it. The terrain is pretty perfect for defence, and if you look on Google you can see the 60 foot thick anti tank walls and huge ditches the South has layered through the valleys.
Seoul hasn’t been in much danger of actually being captured for a long time (1980s maybe), its just too ridiculously densely built up for ANY army to make much progress capturing it in less then several months. War plans have long called for a couple ROK divisions to hold the place as a pocket, while we let the Norks overextend themselves trying to encircle it. Then we exploit full ROK mobilization of manpower (they used to have a 4 million man army reserve force, bigger then the entire US military) and US deployment of more air, armored and marine forces to cut them to pieces.
Now even an encirclement is longer realistic, it would just take too much time against too much firepower, and it would be impossible for North Korea to commit its entire army to an attack owing to lack of fuel and other supplies (except ammo, no shortage of that). The absurd urbanization of the ROK helps all the more. The Norks would just have no place to drive all those tanks, except down nice paved roads on which they would be sitting ducks.
What could happen though is North Korea makes a more limited advance, only going 20-30 miles south, overrunning several smaller South Korean cities and bringing
all its myriad of artillery within range of Seoul, not just the biggest 170mm guns and 240mm rocket launchers (plus of course the ballistic missiles, which easily hit any point in the country). The hope would be then that the ROK would just collapse politically faced with its capital being torn apart, tens of thousands of civilian dead in a day, and the growing by the second threat that North Korea will use chemical or nuclear weapons, and thus demand the withdrawal of all US forces followed by negotiations with the North.
Ironically both North Korea and South Korea are thought to seek a two state, one government solution. North Korea doesn’t want to just make the ROK completely part of itself, because they know they’d destroy its economy, which they obviously would want to benefit from. The ROK meanwhile doesn’t want to just have to unify with the North, because that also would destroy them economically, even with the capitalists in charge. So the only long term hope is that both sides can slowly work towards a middle ground… but the Norks are just so damn crazy they can’t accept aid or joint development projects without it becoming a mortal threat to the stability of its feudal government. We can onlyhope that maybe, just maybe when Kim-Jong dies someone in the North is able to gather enough power to allow actual change. I'm not holding my breath.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
