War with N. Korea poses nightmare scenarios
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WASHINGTON — A full-blown war on the Korean peninsula offers up a nightmare scenario that would cause appalling casualties and potentially trigger a nuclear exchange, experts and former officials say.
The crisis provoked by North Korea’s artillery attack on a South Korean island this week makes the prospect of an all-out conflict look less remote, and US officials — mindful of the high-stakes — have carefully avoided talk of military action.
With an array of artillery trained on Seoul, North Korea could easily blast the glass towers of the South’s booming capital for days and kill huge numbers of civilians before US and South Korean forces prevailed, experts said.
“Official Pentagon models assume it would take months to win the war at a cost approaching one million casualties or more, all told, including dead and wounded,” Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told AFP.
“And that’s without nuclear weapons being used,” said O’Hanlon, who wrote a book looking at the effects of a potential war..... MORE
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20101130com7.html
1 comment
Former president Fidel V. Ramos was part of the Philippine contingent sent by the UN to the Korean conflict in the 1950's. I am proud of our UN contingents spread out across the globe today. May they come home for the holidays. Mothers, wives, husbands, fathers, brothers, sisters a daughther or son, I want them to come home as they left.
Should the unwanted happen, is the Philippines ready to help its ally South Korea?
Considering that it may not be a Battle Group anymore, more like medics and stretcher bearers, will they be properly equipt?
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