Foxbat

‘Just what the CIA expected. That all the manoeuvres the NKs are currently carrying out are part of this exercise they claim to be running.’

The President leant back in his seat and steepled his fingers, then abruptly sat forward again. ‘Are we reading more into this than we should? Could it really be just a routine exercise?’

The Secretary of Defense shook his head decisively. ‘I suppose there’s about a one per cent chance that we’re mistaken, but I believe the evidence is unambiguous. North Korea is gearing up for a push south across the DMZ.’

‘I’ve been briefed by the Joint Chiefs already, but what’s your take on this? If the Agency is right, what can we do to stop them? Do we have enough forces in South Korea to counter an outright invasion?’

The Secretary of Defense shook his head. ‘There’s no way of stopping a North Korean advance, because they outnumber the South in armour, battlefield artillery and also men. That’s always been acknowledged as a virtual certainty. What they lack is support and supply chains in depth, so they could certainly get their forces some way into South Korea, but they wouldn’t be able to sustain their advance or consolidate their positions, and eventually we’d be able to push them back across the DMZ. The one-liner here is that the North Koreans can start a war, but they can’t finish one.’

‘I don’t want them to start a war. We’ve got enough problems in the Middle East as it is.’

‘If they did cross the DMZ it would give us the excuse we need to take out the leadership in Pyongyang.’

The President shook his head. ‘I know, but the timing’s not right and we’re stretched thinly enough as it is. Right, let’s review the evidence that the North Koreans are planning something.’

‘I do believe it’s convincing, Mr President. The satellite imagery shows definite manoeuvres by their troops, and the Eighth Army is now operating several Shadow 200 unmanned aerial vehicles over the DMZ. They fly at between ten and fourteen thousand feet and they’re pretty much invisible at that altitude. They’ve now been redeployed to cover areas further north and the data they’ve collected support the satellite pictures. We’ve also flown them over the nuclear plant at Yongbyon and other sensitive sites, and we’ve been using Guardrail Common Sensor systems close to the DMZ.’

‘Guardrail?’

‘It’s an airborne communications and signals intelligence system – COMINT and SIGINT – developed by the NSA, and it’s recorded a marked increase in radio and signal traffic in the area. Now, none of this conclusively proves that the North Koreans are planning an invasion, but collectively it certainly suggests they’re planning something.

‘As you know, sir, we’ve normally no direct contact with Pyongyang, so we’ve used the strongest diplomatic language we could at the UN, and told them we’d retaliate if any of their troops moved across the DMZ. We just got a bunch of blank stares from the delegation and a repeat of the It’s all an exercise bullshit. They said if their troops did cross into or through the DMZ it would only be because of navigation errors in the heat of the exercise, and therefore they urged that no retaliation be considered.’

‘Great,’ the President muttered. ‘So now they want us to sit back and do nothing while they head straight for Seoul. Well, we’re not going to do that. You clearly told them we’d be prepared to use all our military assets, including missiles, to defend our allies?’

‘Yes, and they insisted it was just an exercise. And then warned that any attack by us or South Korea would be vigorously repulsed.’

The President stood up and paced back and forth behind his huge desk for a minute or so. He sometimes found that walking helped clarity of thought.

‘Let me just summarize the information I’ve already been given. The North Koreans could invade the South and there wouldn’t be a hell of a lot we could do to stop them. But they don’t have the resources to consolidate their advance, and we’d be able to land enough troops and armour to drive them back within a few weeks. Is that a fair assessment?’

‘Yes, Mr President.’

‘And presumably they know this as well as we do?’

‘I can’t speak for the leadership in Pyongyang, but I think their senior military officers will be aware of the limitations in their supply system, yes.’

‘So let me ask the obvious question. Why would they do it? Why would North Korea consider mounting an invasion that they know must ultimately fail? What’s their objective? And would they use nuclear weapons to achieve it?’

The Secretary of Defense, faced with not one but four ‘obvious questions’, guessed that the one the President really wanted an answer to was the last of them.

‘Frankly, Mr President, I’m not convinced, for several reasons. We know the North Koreans have developed nuclear weapons, because of the underground test they carried out in the fall of 2006. But detonating a small atomic device in some kind of test rig isn’t the same as bolting one to a bus on the top of a missile and dropping a cone over it. The miniaturization process is difficult and complicated, and I still think it’s beyond the North Koreans’ technical competence. The CIA believes they’ve been in contact with Iranian scientists, but it’s not clear who’s advising who, and I still say it’s significant that neither nation has so far demonstrated that they have a long-range nuclear delivery capability.’

‘But you do accept that they possess the raw material to manufacture nuclear weapons?’

The Secretary of Defense nodded. ‘Yes, obviously. All our analyses suggest that the Yongbyon reprocessing plant has been producing weapons-grade fissionable material for some time. We don’t know how much they have, but the IAEA calculated a maximum of about thirty-five kilograms. A twenty-kiloton weapon needs eight kilograms of plutonium, so that suggests they could have manufactured four fairly low-yield devices at the most. They obviously used some of it for the Hamgyeong province tests, so our best guess is they’ve got no more than three functioning devices, and that’s not enough to make a credible threat against South Korea – or anywhere else, for that matter.’

The President sat down again. ‘I hear what you say, and I don’t disagree with your conclusions, but the facts remain. North Korea appears to be planning an incursion across the border. Unless the leadership in Pyongyang has completely flipped, they must have a good reason for doing it, and also be confident they can get away with it. So we’ll work on that premise. First, let’s call the roll. What have we got in South Korea right now?’

The Secretary of Defense settled back in his chair. ‘Militarily, the two countries are unevenly matched in almost every sector.’ And he outlined the discrepancies in their inventories. ‘You should also be aware, sir, that defeating North Korea by military means, if it comes to that, is not going to be an easy option. Before you make any decisions, you need to be fully informed of the likely consequences.

‘The public perception is that North Korea is a grindingly poor country with a starving and dissatisfied population ruled by two psychopaths, one of them now dead.’

This is literally true. Kim Il Sung – the ‘Eternal Leader’ – died in 1994 but is still the official ruler and has, since his death, made no decisions worse than he did during his live tenure. The functional head of state is the ‘Dear Leader’, his son. This scenario led the CIA to describe North Korea’s system of government as the ‘CFC Gambit’ – the acronym standing for ‘crippled, fearsome and crazy’.

‘The reality,’ the Secretary of Defense went on, ‘is somewhat different. The nation is a poor country by Western standards, but the vast majority of the people are unswervingly loyal to their leader, and would happily fight to defend him and their homeland. He almost certainly is a psychopath, and he’s definitely deluded – he claimed not long ago that he’d shot five holes-in-one during a single round of golf, which would make anyone who’s ever picked up a golf club doubt his sanity.’

The President laughed briefly.

‘More seriously, the country’s been in a state of siege ever since the nineteen-fifties, and the bulk of their GNP is spent annually on preparations for war. And, by any standards, they are very well prepared for conflict.

‘Just to give you a few examples: most of their fighter and bomber aircraft aren’t kept in hangars the way ours are. The North Koreans excavate deep into the northern slopes of the mountains, which are mainly granite,