What a New Korean War Might Entail: Hundreds of Thousands of Casualties in Just the First Three Months

In case you’re wondering what a war on the Korean peninsula might entail, this appeared in the Atlantic Monthly back in the July/August 2005 edition of the magazine. It was written by Scott Stossel:

North Korea is widely believed to have as many as ten [nuclear weapons]already, and to be producing more every year. (It is also the first developing nation thought to be capable of striking the continental United States with a long-range ballistic missile.) And whereas Iraq did not, after all, have weapons of mass destruction, North Korea is believed to have large stockpiles of chemical weapons (mustard gas, sarin, VX nerve agent) and biological weapons (anthrax, botulism, cholera, hemorrhagic fever, plague, smallpox, typhoid, yellow fever). An actual war on the Korean peninsula would almost certainly be the bloodiest America has fought since Vietnam—possibly since World War II. In recent years Pentagon experts have estimated that the first ninety days of such a conflict might produce 300,000 to 500,000 South Korean and American military casualties, along with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. The damage to South Korea alone would rock the global economy.

And it appears that Kim Jong-il may be clinically paranoid.

Pleasant dreams.