“If these are knocked out, along with major existing U.S.

Army major who has taken part in the annual spring drills. deterrence relies on the ability to air-land a brigade combat team, within days, followed by a division plus within one or two months, and this requires fully functioning and air and sea points of disembarkation,” said David Park, a retired U.S.

Kim could follow Russian President Vladimir Putin’s playbook in Ukraine - launching a conventional invasion bracketed by the threat of a nuclear strike to keep outside states from intervening.Īnother possibility is the North could use a smaller, “tactical” nuclear strike to prevent American reinforcements from reaching the peninsula in time. the intention part: ‘What do you do with it?’” “Now it has come to fruition, we are seeing deployment and preparation. “A threat is a capability and an intention, and North Korea has been working intensively on acquiring capabilities over the past 10 years,” said Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based international relations professor at Troy University. It also claimed that some 1.4 million citizens have volunteered for the nation’s military.īut South Korean analysts said the North’s public emphasis on the rewriting of its nuclear protocols and the stress-testing of its missile units marks a distinct shift in the isolated nation’s weapons of mass destruction programs, experts say. In an eye-catching series of tests last week, the North launched its giant new Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile and two submarine-launched missiles. The South Korean drills follow a closed-door tabletop exercise held in the United States in February, which focused specifically on how to respond to a nuclear weapon attack by Pyongyang. and South Korean militaries were scheduled to conduct large-scale marine landing exercises. Shortly after the North Korean missile launch was spotted, the U.S. The drills, which run through Thursday, are aimed at countering the North’s evolving threats. To the south, Seoul and Washington are staging the largest annual version of their “Freedom Shield” military exercises since 2017.

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