Micheal wrote:
Many people think we are in South Korea to protect them from the North Koreans. According to many soldiers I've talked to over the years, it is the exact opposite. we are there to prevent the civil war from flaring up and having the South Koreans take out North Korea. Even an impoverished country with nuclear weapons still has a good chance of using them before being shut down.
There's a great deal of truth to this, except that the real issue is not the nuclear weapons. NK can only have them in low numbers at small yields if at all, and may not have them in useful, deliverable formats such as missile warheads at all. The real problem is NK's immense quantities of artillery, especially mixed with gas and the proximity to Seoul.
We
are in South Korea to protect them from the North Koreans, but not in the sense of stopping them from being overrun. What we're preventing is a war that the North would almost certainly ultimately lose barring Chinese intervention, but in the opening stages of which, civilian casualties in Seoul and elsewhere along the DMZ could be enormous.
Eventually, nuclear weapons could become the bigger threat, but with no more test detonations to gain data and a very slow rate of producing fissionable material, it's going to be a long process for the North. The other problem for them is delivery; ABM systems are starting to proliferate and the Nork Air Force has little chance of getting a plane through the combined SK/American air defenses. The biggest worries IMO are A) use of nukes as "nuclear land mines" or other tactical weapons, including aircraft bombs on the front lines where the attacking aircraft does not have to penetrate miles and miles of SK-controlled airspace B) possibly putting a nuclear warhead on a torpedo and firing it into a crowded harbor. Back in the early 1960s before the Soviets had credible ICBMs or long-ranged bombers and their SSBN fleet was in its infancy, that was part of their plan for SSBNs; after their missiles were fired they were to go to places like Newport News or NYC and fire nuclear torpedos into the harbor.