By Jun Ji-hye
An additional 150,000 U.S. troops would be necessary to secure North Korea’s nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in the event of the reclusive state’s collapse, according to a U.S. think tank, Wednesday.
The RAND Corp. said in a report, “Building the Army We Will Need,” that North Korea might suddenly collapse ― either as a result of war or the failure of its economy and government. “After such a collapse, a key U.S. concern would be to find, seize, secure and remove its WMD (weapons of massive destruction), in particular its nuclear weapons,” the report said.
“In such an event, the greatest burden would likely fall on U.S. forces to eliminate these weapons … We estimate that a North Korean collapse would require an additional 150,000 U.S. troops over and above the forces already stationed and presumed to be available in the Asia-Pacific region.”
About 28,500 U.S. troops are currently stationed in South Korea to help deter threats from North Korea because 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, leaving South and North Korea technically at war.
Referring to the U.S. budget constraints known as “sequestration,” which has led the U.S. Army to plan to cut the number of troops to about 400,000 from current 490,000, the think tank said the Army should rather increase the troop levels to 545,000 in order to handle such contingencies.
The institute also called on allies to pay more attention to the repressive state’s artillery capabilities and come up with countermeasures.
“North Korea may launch many shorter-range missiles against South Korea or Japan, potentially saturating their ballistic missile defenses. Worse, the U.S. strategy does not directly address the artillery threat to Seoul, including the potential use of North Korean artillery to employ WMD,” the report said.
The RAND Corp. raised the possibility that Pyongyang might use artillery to deliver nuclear weapons.
“Opinions differ about how close the North Koreans are to building a miniaturized weapon capable of fitting within their long-range missiles, but their recently revealed ability to separate uranium could give them the ability to build gun-assembled fission weapons similar to the W-33 the U.S. Army deployed in 1956,” the think tank said. “This weapon was small enough to be fired from an 8-inch artillery tube, yet produced yields of up to 10 kilotons. If North Korea produced such a weapon, Seoul could be in range of nuclear weapons fired from existing, hardened, artillery sites.”
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