The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [176]
In Pyongyang, Kim Il Sung explained the situation as he saw it to his friend, Cambodian chief of state Norodom Sihanouk: "Please compare us to a man: They want us to take off our shirt, our coat and now our trousers, and after that we will be nude, absolutely naked. What they want us to be is a man without defense secrets, just a naked man. We cannot accept that. We would rather accept a war. If they decide to make war, we accept the war, the challenge we are prepared for." In case anyone failed to get the point, North Korea issued a formal statement on June 5 announcing that "sanctions mean war, and there is no mercy in war."
Undeterred, Washington proceeded with diplomatic consultations aimed at a sanctions vote in the Security Council and, in parallel, with plans for a stepped-up U.S. military presence in and around Korea, preparing for the possibility of war.
THE MILITARY TRACK
Throughout the four decades since the armistice of 1953, the U.S. military considered the renewal of war in Korea to be one of its most dangerous potential challenges. Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, American military planners had consistently identified Korea as the most likely spot for hostilities involving the United States in Asia. Although U.S. troops had been reduced over the years to 37,000, the presence of these forces guaranteed that the United States would be instantly involved if the massive North Korean army should attack across the narrow demilitarized zone. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war, U.S. military forces were restructured as a "base force" whose main job was to be capable of fighting two regional wars at once-one of which was consistently identified as a renewal of war in Korea. Michael O'Hanlon, a Brookings Institution researcher, calculated that without the Korean contingency, the United States would be able to cut its military force structure by about one-fourth, saving $20-$30 billion per year. This is about as much as the federal government spends for all health research programs, or for natural resources and environmental cleanup. After the Gulf War, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Colin Powell said breezily but with considerable truth, "I'm running out of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il Sung."
In late 1993 and early 1994, as the international tension over North Korea's nuclear program heightened again, the U.S. Command in Korea began to prepare more seriously for new hostilities. For the first time in decades, the U.S. military war plan-Operations Plan 50-27-took on the flesh-and-blood colors of reality rather than remaining abstract papers in folders and computer programs. Although it kept the same designation number, the plan had been updated several times over the years, and its emphasis had shifted from defensive maneuvers to offensive action north of the DMZ, to take the fighting into North Korea after the start of hostilities. The early 1990s revision of the war plan under the supervision of General Robert RisCassi, who was chief of the U.S. Command at the time, authorized a massive U.S. and ROK counterattack to take Pyongyang and topple the North Korean regime, with an option to proceed farther north toward the Chinese border and essentially reunify the country. It also put heavier emphasis on military steps to be taken by the United States and South Korea in the "pre-hostility" phase leading up to a potential outbreak of war.
To the surprise of U.S. commanders, ROK defense minister Lee Pyong Tae publicly outlined the essence of the war plan in testimony to National