US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made waves on Friday when he expressed his dissatisfaction with decades of failed diplomacy towards North Korea and mentioned that the US would consider " all options ," including military strikes.
To be fair, the US has always considered all options.
If any nation in the world threatens another, the US, with its global reach, considers a range of diplomatic, economic, and even kinetic options to shape the situation.
But defense experts say a military strike against North Korea is unlikely for a number of reasons.
"There is no plausible military option," Jeffrey Lewis, founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk told Business Insider. "To remove the North Korean government is general war."
Because North Korea has missiles hidden all across the country , there's simply no way to quickly and cleanly remove the Kim regime from power or even neutralize the nuclear threat, according to Lewis.
"This is not a case where you're striking a nuclear program in its early stages," said Lewis, who noted that North Korea has been testing nuclear weapons for more than a decade. "The time to do a preemptive attack was like 20 years ago."
Last month, North Korea tested a land-based nuclear-capable ballistic missile that could be launched off a tank-like truck in a matter of minutes. And though the country's nuclear arsenal is still in its early phases, the country reportedly commands 100 missile launchers with several missiles for each.
Last September, the country tested a nuclear weapon some estimates suggest was more powerful than the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima.
While North Korea's nuclear threat has grown, according to Lewis, massive artillery installations hidden in the hills and trained on South Korea's capital and most populous city, Seoul have long been a problem.
But artillery and shelling is nowhere near as destructive as nuclear weapons. If North Korean artillery fired on Seoul, South Korea would counter attack and suppress fire.
It would kill a lot of people and be a humanitarian disaster," Lewis said of a North Korean artillery strike on Seoul. "But that's nothing like putting a nuclear weapon on Seoul, Busan, or Tokyo. North Korea's ability to inflict damage has gone way up."
As Tillerson accurately stated, diplomatic efforts to quash North Korea's nuclear ambitions have failed for decades. The US's patience has been understandably tried by the recent missile launches clearly intended as a saturation attack, where a large volume of missiles would overwhelm US and allied missile defenses.
However, there is a way out. China recently floated a North Korean-backed proposal for the US to end their annual military drills with South Korea and, in return, North Korea would stop working on nukes. The US flat out rejected the offer , as they have in the past.
"T he onus is on North Korea to take meaningful actions toward denuclearization and refrain from provocations," Mark Toner, the acting spokesman for the State Department, said at a press briefing on Wednesday.
Toner suggested that comparing the US's transparent, planned, defensive, and 40-year-old military drills in South Korea with North Korea's 24 ballistic missile launches in 2016 was a case of "apples to oranges."
North Korea's position is "not crazy," according to Lewis. There is a long history of serious military conflicts beginning under the pretense of military exercises, as Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia did.
"The reality is that the US forces are there, we say they're there for an exercise, but you can't take that as a promise, you have to treat it as an invasion," said Lewis.
Instead, Lewis suggested that part of the purpose of the military exercises has always been to make sure the US and South Korea can capably execute their war plans, but the other purpose has always been political - to reassure South Korea.
Meanwhile, each year the Foal Eagle exercises, where the US and South Korea rehearse their war plan for conflict with North Korea, grow in size. Lewis said that reducing the exercises could go a long way towards calming down North Korea.
If diplomacy and sanctions continue to fail, the consequences could be disastrous.
"North Korea wants an ICBM with a thermonuclear weapon. They're not going to stop cause they get bored," Lewis said.
The US and North Korea are currently locked in strategies to "maximize pain" on the other party, according to Lewis. The US holds massive drills in part to scare North Korea, while North Korea tests nukes to scare the west.
Without some form of cooperation between the two sides soon, diplomacy will continue to fail until it fails catastrophically. And that makes military confrontations, though unlikely, more viable every day
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