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The assessment predicts: "Tens or hundreds of thousands could become casualties" ... in the event of an all-out DRPK/(US+ROK) conflict. One factor to consider

The assessment predicts: "Tens or hundreds of thousands could become casualties" ... in the event of an all-out DRPK/(US+ROK) conflict. One factor to consider here is what happens if no conflict occurs? In that case, there are ... still likely tens of thousands of civilian deaths happening as the status quo in North Korean labor camps[1]. Allowing the regime to continue to exist also has a major cost in human lives. I'm not saying war is clearly a superior option - I'm saying this whole situation is mostly losses. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_North_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_North_Korea

0xfeba 9y ago
I think one of the major reasons no one does anything about it, ignoring the buffer China enjoys from the US (via proxy), is the humanitarian crisis from the entire NK population after the war is over. Who is going to help them? China? SK?
- antimatter 9y ago
  > Who is going to help them? China? SK? Most likely? The US taxpayers.
  - vkou 9y ago
    Doubtful. If Iraq is any indication, US reconstruction money is as likely to be stolen by the contractors, as it is not.
- lettergram 9y ago
  South Korea already has plans in place for that. I can't find the article at the moment, but they feel super bad for and about North Korea and really want to help if they could
  - panglott 9y ago
    Everything I've read about a postwar reconstruction of North Korea says that the costs would be much, much greater than the integration of East and West Germany. Not only assuming that a hot war would have serious consequences to the economy of South Korea.
  - deckiedan 9y ago
    I spent some time in South Korea working with several churches there - they are in tears over the situation in the North every day praying for them. I'm sure if/when it happens there will be a staggeringly huge amount of money poured in from the churches, and other religious people around the world (on top of everything the governments put in...)
  - sverhagen 9y ago
    Not a very literate and informed reply I'm having here, but just from friendly conversations with a few South Koreans, what I'm getting is that the current generation, many of which haven't grown up in an active war situation, have a much smaller appetite for reunification than their elders may have had. And while they have plans in place (there's a Ministry of Unification) I doubt it that South Korea has money set aside for the real cost of unification (since those amounts would be so tremendous that it'd probably be economically and politically irresponsible to withdraw that much money from the active economy for this long). But then, I'm as little an economic expert as I am an expert on Korea's reunification...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
panglott 9y ago
"Allowing the regime to continue to exist" is a backwards way of looking at things that serves to legitimate invasions. The US is a superpower, but that doesn't mean that other nation-states exist because we deign to suffer their existence—that's a very colonialist way of looking at the world. Invading the north (or provoking it with special operations) would be a positive action for which the US would be responsible. North Korea is a bad state, and bad for its people, but the unspeakable carnage that would result from major ground warfare on the Korean peninsula is something else entirely.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  The flip side of your argument is it accepts the Kims' ownership over North Korea's land and population. The concept of legitimacy is fuzzy. There is gray area between defense and colonialist conquest.
  - panglott 9y ago
    It's implicit in your statement that the moral repugnancy of the Kim regime makes any acceptance of its existence intolerable. But that clearly implies we should remove the Kim regime; but invading countries is also generally immoral and the consequences of Korean War II are also morally repugnant.
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      > that clearly implies we should remove the Kim regime No, it just means we can discuss it without moral censure. There have been lots of multilateral and unilateral interventions, covert and overt, since World War II. Global stability is built on great powers not warring with each other.
- charles-salvia 9y ago
  That's a subjective value call. It depends on how many North Koreans are being brutalized/dying right now. We don't have that number, but it's likely that tens of thousands of the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners will die of starvation or execution within a few years. So unspeakable carnage is already the default state, and we already have a situation here that is comparable to Khmer Rouge or Stalinist Russia levels of human-rights violations. Regardless, the colonial past of Western powers is not relevant here. I am not suggesting a policy of Imperialism. I am just pointing out that North Korea's very existence comes with a serious cost in human life. This might be something we should at least factor in when weighing the heavy costs of destroying the Kim regime.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
This almost always goes unsaid so thanks for saying it. The general conditions of North Korean population is staggeringly bad. Eating grass and bark soup [1], iterant cannibalism [2] etc... When you consider the Prison situation without sounding glib, it's near holocaust levels of horrors [3]. [1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2010/07/starving-north-koreans-forced-survive-diet-grass-and-tree-bark/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2010/07/starving-nort... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05/the-cannibals-of-north-korea/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05... [3] http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/ReportoftheCommissionofInquiryDPRK.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/Reportoft... Say what you will about international relations, pre-emptive war etc... but if the moral argument for entering WW-II for the purpose of liberating those in the concentration camps is universal then there is certainly a case to be made for North Korean conflict. It's admittedly 1000x more complex of course.
- AlexeyBrin 9y ago
  > but if the moral argument for entering WW-II for the purpose of liberating those in the concentration camps Hugh? Sorry, but who told you that someone entered the WW2 to liberate someone from the concentration camps ? Liberating the camps was a consequence of the end of the war not the reason any country entered in the conflict.
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    To be clear - I'm not making the point that the US entered WW-II predominantly for the humanitarian reason of liberating the camps. In fact we didn't know much about them when we entered in 1941. Rather, one of the strongest used moral cases for WWII (post facto) was the liberation. We have even stronger evidence of this same moral case in Korea, than we did in WWII, so if we're consistent then there is a good case to be made here. One could argue however that this post facto moral back patting in WWII is just how we justify it. So if that's the case you're making then I got nothin for ya.
    - 9y ago
jerf 9y ago
"One factor to consider here is what happens if no conflict occurs?" Another angle is the threat North Korea wields is not static. 20 years ago we were worried "What if NK starts shelling Seoul?" Now we're worried "What if NK nukes Seoul or maybe Japan?" We're either at or just a year or two away from "What if NK nukes Hawaii?" with rapid progress towards "What if NK nukes the United States?" Give it another twenty years and it'll be "What if NK launches all of its couple hundred nukes at once?" and "What if NK deploys its bioweapons?" or even "What if NK simply accidentally mishandles its bioweapons and something it is developing gets out into the world?" I'm not advocating for any particular solution here, not least of which is because at least at the moment I haven't got any skin in this game... at least, for another year or two, until NK can indeed reach me with a nuke-tipped missile, and even then, the odds they'd pick where I live is very, very low.[1] I don't know exactly how to analyze this case in game theory. But I at least recognize there is an element of this setup where even though at any given moment the locally rational thing to do is not to attack or provoke North Korea, the globally rational thing to do is probably not to keep choosing that choice indefinitely. One way or another, eventually North Korea is going to have to offer the international community another choice, whether it likes it or not. (My personal suspicion is that China really is moving to constrain them and we see a good chance of perhaps-surprising cooperation, even if a Kabuki show is put on about the details, because it was all fun and games for China when what NK has was artillery pointed at a foreign city they didn't much care about, or had some scary weapons pointed at them. Even a couple of small nukes that can't reach China's really important assets might not concern them. But unless North Korea's posture has 100% been a carefully calculated act by otherwise ruthlessly logical individuals, which I'd suggest is not where the evidence points us, an actual nuclear power North Korea that has dozens of missiles that can reach anywhere in the world becomes a true threat to China as well, not only directly, but in that it might give other regional powers Ideas about how to "more effectively" leverage their nuclear arsenals to extract concessions from China, which I'd expect NK to immediately move to do as their only refuge at this point would be in audacity. As the NK threat continues to ramp up they become a threat to even more actors. Even for the US, the NK has been more "thorn in our side" than actual threat.) [1]: Though that probably doesn't apply to all readers here. If I were North Korea and I was looking for ways to hurt the US, Washington DC would be my target #1... but Silicon Valley would be on my very, very short list, as not only hurting the US financially, but also symbolically. Personally I think I'd put Hollywood above it, then maybe New York, but Silicon Valley makes a pretty plausible 4th, as a way of striking the industry where the US is arguably most clearly leading the world in one relatively small place. So, you know, this discussion is IMHO getting rapidly less theoretical than some of us may like.
yongjik 9y ago
Not saying you're wrong, but the same argument was used to justify the "liberation" of Iraq.

0xfeba 9y ago

I think one of the major reasons no one does anything about it, ignoring the buffer China enjoys from the US (via proxy), is the humanitarian crisis from the entire NK population after the war is over. Who is going to help them? China? SK?

antimatter 9y ago
> Who is going to help them? China? SK? Most likely? The US taxpayers.
- vkou 9y ago
  Doubtful. If Iraq is any indication, US reconstruction money is as likely to be stolen by the contractors, as it is not.
lettergram 9y ago
South Korea already has plans in place for that. I can't find the article at the moment, but they feel super bad for and about North Korea and really want to help if they could
- panglott 9y ago
  Everything I've read about a postwar reconstruction of North Korea says that the costs would be much, much greater than the integration of East and West Germany. Not only assuming that a hot war would have serious consequences to the economy of South Korea.
- deckiedan 9y ago
  I spent some time in South Korea working with several churches there - they are in tears over the situation in the North every day praying for them. I'm sure if/when it happens there will be a staggeringly huge amount of money poured in from the churches, and other religious people around the world (on top of everything the governments put in...)
- sverhagen 9y ago
  Not a very literate and informed reply I'm having here, but just from friendly conversations with a few South Koreans, what I'm getting is that the current generation, many of which haven't grown up in an active war situation, have a much smaller appetite for reunification than their elders may have had. And while they have plans in place (there's a Ministry of Unification) I doubt it that South Korea has money set aside for the real cost of unification (since those amounts would be so tremendous that it'd probably be economically and politically irresponsible to withdraw that much money from the active economy for this long). But then, I'm as little an economic expert as I am an expert on Korea's reunification...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

panglott 9y ago

"Allowing the regime to continue to exist" is a backwards way of looking at things that serves to legitimate invasions. The US is a superpower, but that doesn't mean that other nation-states exist because we deign to suffer their existence—that's a very colonialist way of looking at the world. Invading the north (or provoking it with special operations) would be a positive action for which the US would be responsible. North Korea is a bad state, and bad for its people, but the unspeakable carnage that would result from major ground warfare on the Korean peninsula is something else entirely.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
The flip side of your argument is it accepts the Kims' ownership over North Korea's land and population. The concept of legitimacy is fuzzy. There is gray area between defense and colonialist conquest.
- panglott 9y ago
  It's implicit in your statement that the moral repugnancy of the Kim regime makes any acceptance of its existence intolerable. But that clearly implies we should remove the Kim regime; but invading countries is also generally immoral and the consequences of Korean War II are also morally repugnant.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > that clearly implies we should remove the Kim regime No, it just means we can discuss it without moral censure. There have been lots of multilateral and unilateral interventions, covert and overt, since World War II. Global stability is built on great powers not warring with each other.
charles-salvia 9y ago
That's a subjective value call. It depends on how many North Koreans are being brutalized/dying right now. We don't have that number, but it's likely that tens of thousands of the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners will die of starvation or execution within a few years. So unspeakable carnage is already the default state, and we already have a situation here that is comparable to Khmer Rouge or Stalinist Russia levels of human-rights violations. Regardless, the colonial past of Western powers is not relevant here. I am not suggesting a policy of Imperialism. I am just pointing out that North Korea's very existence comes with a serious cost in human life. This might be something we should at least factor in when weighing the heavy costs of destroying the Kim regime.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

This almost always goes unsaid so thanks for saying it. The general conditions of North Korean population is staggeringly bad. Eating grass and bark soup [1], iterant cannibalism [2] etc... When you consider the Prison situation without sounding glib, it's near holocaust levels of horrors [3]. [1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2010/07/starving-north-koreans-forced-survive-diet-grass-and-tree-bark/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2010/07/starving-nort... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05/the-cannibals-of-north-korea/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05... [3] http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/ReportoftheCommissionofInquiryDPRK.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/Reportoft... Say what you will about international relations, pre-emptive war etc... but if the moral argument for entering WW-II for the purpose of liberating those in the concentration camps is universal then there is certainly a case to be made for North Korean conflict. It's admittedly 1000x more complex of course.

AlexeyBrin 9y ago
> but if the moral argument for entering WW-II for the purpose of liberating those in the concentration camps Hugh? Sorry, but who told you that someone entered the WW2 to liberate someone from the concentration camps ? Liberating the camps was a consequence of the end of the war not the reason any country entered in the conflict.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  To be clear - I'm not making the point that the US entered WW-II predominantly for the humanitarian reason of liberating the camps. In fact we didn't know much about them when we entered in 1941. Rather, one of the strongest used moral cases for WWII (post facto) was the liberation. We have even stronger evidence of this same moral case in Korea, than we did in WWII, so if we're consistent then there is a good case to be made here. One could argue however that this post facto moral back patting in WWII is just how we justify it. So if that's the case you're making then I got nothin for ya.
  - 9y ago

jerf 9y ago

"One factor to consider here is what happens if no conflict occurs?" Another angle is the threat North Korea wields is not static. 20 years ago we were worried "What if NK starts shelling Seoul?" Now we're worried "What if NK nukes Seoul or maybe Japan?" We're either at or just a year or two away from "What if NK nukes Hawaii?" with rapid progress towards "What if NK nukes the United States?" Give it another twenty years and it'll be "What if NK launches all of its couple hundred nukes at once?" and "What if NK deploys its bioweapons?" or even "What if NK simply accidentally mishandles its bioweapons and something it is developing gets out into the world?" I'm not advocating for any particular solution here, not least of which is because at least at the moment I haven't got any skin in this game... at least, for another year or two, until NK can indeed reach me with a nuke-tipped missile, and even then, the odds they'd pick where I live is very, very low.[1] I don't know exactly how to analyze this case in game theory. But I at least recognize there is an element of this setup where even though at any given moment the locally rational thing to do is not to attack or provoke North Korea, the globally rational thing to do is probably not to keep choosing that choice indefinitely. One way or another, eventually North Korea is going to have to offer the international community another choice, whether it likes it or not. (My personal suspicion is that China really is moving to constrain them and we see a good chance of perhaps-surprising cooperation, even if a Kabuki show is put on about the details, because it was all fun and games for China when what NK has was artillery pointed at a foreign city they didn't much care about, or had some scary weapons pointed at them. Even a couple of small nukes that can't reach China's really important assets might not concern them. But unless North Korea's posture has 100% been a carefully calculated act by otherwise ruthlessly logical individuals, which I'd suggest is not where the evidence points us, an actual nuclear power North Korea that has dozens of missiles that can reach anywhere in the world becomes a true threat to China as well, not only directly, but in that it might give other regional powers Ideas about how to "more effectively" leverage their nuclear arsenals to extract concessions from China, which I'd expect NK to immediately move to do as their only refuge at this point would be in audacity. As the NK threat continues to ramp up they become a threat to even more actors. Even for the US, the NK has been more "thorn in our side" than actual threat.) [1]: Though that probably doesn't apply to all readers here. If I were North Korea and I was looking for ways to hurt the US, Washington DC would be my target #1... but Silicon Valley would be on my very, very short list, as not only hurting the US financially, but also symbolically. Personally I think I'd put Hollywood above it, then maybe New York, but Silicon Valley makes a pretty plausible 4th, as a way of striking the industry where the US is arguably most clearly leading the world in one relatively small place. So, you know, this discussion is IMHO getting rapidly less theoretical than some of us may like.

yongjik 9y ago

Not saying you're wrong, but the same argument was used to justify the "liberation" of Iraq.