North Korea’s newly-tested nuke is bad news, for sure. But the bigger worry, says Popular Mechanics is the “huge arsenal of mass casualty weapons” that Kim & Co. have been assembling for 45 years: biological and chemical arms.
While it would be foolish not to be gravely concerned about North Korea’s purported development of an offensive nuclear capability, the actual threat for the foreseeable future is, arguably, minimal. North Korea’s threadbare economy (it has a GDP of $40 billion — compare that to California’s gross state product on $1.55 trillion per year) is incapable of maintaining an effective nuclear weapons program. Its nuclear science is at best second rate and, certainly, is second hand.
In contrast, as one North Korea expert explained to me, CBW is mass destruction on the cheap. “Biological and chemical weapons are very inexpensive, many, many times cheaper than nuclear.” Another expert gave this grim assessment: “The use of anthrax is a distinct possibility for this nation [North Korea]…“
The consensus among weapons inspectors, intelligence analysts, academics and others I have interviewedwhich is backed up by the available open source material-is that North Korea has developed anthrax, plague and botulism toxin as weapons and has extensively researched at least six other germs including smallpox and typhoid. It is also believed to have 5,000 tons or more of mustard gas, sarin nerve agent and phosgene (a choking gas). The Center for Nonproliferation Studies says North Korea ranks “amongst the largest possessors of chemical weaponry in the world.” South Korea’s military estimates half of North’s long-range missiles and 30 percent of its artillery are CBW capable…
Yet the West’s myopic obsession with North Korea’s nuclear efforts has allowed this far more real and equally lethal threat to escape into the shadows: a WMD program, backed by in excess of 13,000 specially trained troops, capable of devastating its southern neighbor, attacking U.S. troops in Asia and disrupting the regional economy in ways that could see the U.S. and other western nations plunged into crisis.
Yes, the new [United Nations] resolution 1718(2006) includes a reference to biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, but only as an afterthought, and the resolution exists only because of the nukes and their perceived threat. Unfortunately, in this case, as with others, the world is overly focused on a potential retina-searing nuclear detonation, without properly appreciating the very clear-and-present CBW killer that exists just a virtual button’s push away from Kim Jong Il’s perfectly manicured fingernails.
If the whole thing sounds a little hysterical to you, chem-bio guru Jason Sigger says: get real. The story is “100 percent right in regards to N. Korea. And you can extend that argument to China, Iran, Syria, Israel, Pakistan, and India, and potentially in the near future (because of Iran), Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and others.”
Seriously, I see this all the time in the “combating WMD” community. The arms control and counterproliferation people talk “WMD” but the subtext is “nuke.” Even the majority of the consequence management tasks are now “dirty bomb” or “improvised nuclear device” scenarios… [the] mentality is [that] nukes are the only thing that can drastically affect US military power in any region of the world.
But there are other threats, too.
Normally, I would argue that threat of chemical and biological weapons outside of the terrorism context is relatively low because:
1) The mass to destruction ratio of nuclear weapons is geometricaly larger than CB agents.
2) The technical requirements for delivering enough chemical or biological agents to match the body count caused by a small nuclear weapons are prohibitively high for most countries.
The tacit rule of thumb here is that if you are going to cross the line, you should do the most damage possible when you cross it. Chemical warheads on a few hundred ballistic missiles don’t have nearly the same punch as a nuclear weapons does.
The DPRK is the one very dangerous exception to this case. It has approximately around 200 metric tonnes of nerve, blister and blood agents and thousands of artillery pieces in range of Seoul to deliver them. That is the kind of existential CB threat to worry about.
I wonder if this is why SK and China are so reluctant to push NK harder? This never appears in the stories I read. Conventional arty raining on Seoul, refugees into China. Always that, but never B/C warfare. Anyone seen this aspect in mainstream thinking in SK or China?
But are these weapons really any worse than conventional explosives? I thought the lessons of WWI, Iran-Iraq, and Aum Shinrikio were that plain old bombs and bullets were far more effective and reliable. Of course, chemical weapons have a certain terror cachet that more conventional weapons don’t, but do they really have the potential to kill or injure more than the old fashioned stuff? If so, they don’t seem to have ever achieved this potential yet. The gas attack in the Tokyo subway did a lot less damage than the bomb attacks in London and Madrid.
A big problem with DPRK chem wepaons is that it serves as a huge detterant against military action. If we were to invade North Korea, within hours they would have long range artillery pounding Seoul with Chem/bio weapons.
It would be kinda like if Iraq was right next to Israel in the First Gulf War.