By Kang Hyun-kyung
Kim Jin-myung’s steady seller “THAAD” is based on a radical war scenario featuring the detrimental consequences of the U.S.-China rivalry over the Korean Peninsula.
The story explores the victimization of South Korea as a result of endeavors by the United States, a superpower in decline, to maintain hegemony at the expense of a war with the rising power China.
The writer thinks that Washington is pushing for the deployment of the anti-ballistic missile system in South Korea because it is a necessary step to counter the Chinese military.
If deployed on the Korean Peninsula as the U.S. government wishes, the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD) will make China’s ballistic missile system useless because the anti-ballistic missile system will detect missiles immediately and shoot them down.
Kim says this explains why China is so upset at the U.S. push for the deployment of THAAD.
Washington sees THAAD as a litmus test to gauge whether South Korea is a genuine ally or not.
If the South accepts it, the United States will conclude Seoul is a true ally willing to be part of the U.S.-led coalition, along with Japan, against China.
Based on a U.S. think tank’s projection, Kim argues that a conventional war on the Korean Peninsula will cost the United States approximately $1 trillion, as well as the lives of nearly 60,000 U.S. soldiers with nearly 30,000 wounded.
If the South rejects THAAD and opts to remain neutral for fear of losing its No. 1 trading partner, the United States will be tempted to change the way of the war. A nuclear war on the peninsula will be inevitable, the book says.
If this happens, it goes on to say that U.S. soldiers based in Pyongtaek will board ships from the nearby harbor and sail toward the West Sea so that they will remain safe.
Writer Kim dubs such a scenario as the “$1 trillion price tag Pyongtaek Deal.”
The war scenario is based on the presumption that the United States, which is struggling with snowballing deficits but still unrivaled in terms of military power, will have an appetite for a war against China to turn the tide.
Then it will want to break up multi-ethnic China into several nations the same way the former Soviet Union experienced after the change in the then Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s.
Two lead characters — Choi Eur-min, a novice lawyer, and his mentor Kim Yoon-hoo, an alcoholic, veteran lawyer — represent divided public opinion in Korea regarding the deployment of the anti-ballistic missile system.
Choi insists that joining the U.S. missile system is a bad idea because it will inevitably cause a war with China on the Korean Peninsula.
Kim, meanwhile, argues that South Korea should be in the same boat with the United States and be ready to face the consequences its decision, noting there is no country like the United States which is ready to pay the price for mutual gains with South Korea.
The war fiction seems to be vulnerable to criticism that it disregards the dual purpose of weapons. Weapons are developed both for a war and deterrence as well.
A war between the two world’s largest economies is also simply too costly and neither sides are expected to benefit from such an extreme choice in the highly globalized world.
This school of thought indicates that the U.S. ratcheting up pressure on South Korea to accept the deployment of THAAD is more commercially driven, rather than a war plan.