North Korea's young leader Kim Jong Un today ordered his missile batteries to prepare to launch against U.S. and South Korea targets, the latest act of belligerence that has left the United States and the world on edge in recent weeks.
But despite Kim's menacing posture, the U.S. military recently wargamed a different scenario: how many American troops would be needed to go in and secure North Korea's nuclear arsenal if Kim's regime collapsed.
That was the objective this February when the U.S. military played out its Winter Wargame, that the autocratic rule of Kim Jong Un unraveled either from civil unrest or a challenge to his power and his arsenal of nukes was up for grabs. It's a scenario that some believe is more likely than a North Korea attack on the south.
"North Korea has relied on these time honored, very effective tools that dictators have wielded all over the world, and what we know about these tools is that they work until they don't," said Jennifer Lind, a Dartmouth professor who has studied potential missions to North Korea.
Recent years have seen the sudden collapse of dictatorial regimes in Libya and Egypt, and Syria is now in flames with control of its chemical weapons in doubt.
"A regime collapse is always on the table, and we are in an uncertain period of leadership transition," said Rodger Baker, a geopolitical analyst from Stratfor Global Intelligence.
In a war game focusing on the fictitious country "North Brownland," military experts from the Army's forward-looking research arm, the Concept Development and Learning Directorate, assessed how many U.S. troops it would take to go into a North Korea-like place to secure the weapons after a crisis erupted, and how quickly those weapons could be secured.
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