The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [178]
While fighting a war was never far from Luck's mind, he told me, "my job is deterrence," to make sure it does not happen. He acknowledged that his was a delicate balancing act, to improve the capabilities of U.S. and ROK forces in a very tense situation without the improvements themselves causing the explosion they were intended to deter. What he wanted to avoid, Luck said, was anything that could "spook" the North Koreans and cause them to react by striking out in a "cornered rat syndrome." For this reason, he said, it was not helpful for them to believe that the military balance on the peninsula was turning against them-as demonstrably it was. As I prepared to leave Luck's office, he paused and said gravely, "I just want you to know I'm comfortable in this job. I can do the job. If things go bad, I'm ready. I can handle it."
As North Korea began defueling its reactor and storm clouds darkened, Luck flew to Washington to join an extraordinary military meeting to prepare to fight in Korea. Secretary of Defense Perry and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General John Shalikashvili summoned every active four-star general and admiral in the U.S. military, including several brought from commands across the world, to a Pentagon conference room on May 18. The subject was how the entire U.S. military would support Luck's war plan for Korea, with troops, materiel, and logistics. Among other things, the top military brass went over details of preparatory deployments of troops and transport from other commands, the shifting of U.S. aircraft carriers and land-based warplanes closer to the Korean coast, and plans for massive reinforcement-deployment of roughly half of all U.S. major combat forcesif hostilities actually got under way. Everyone was conscious that this was no paper exercise but "a real meeting of real war fighters to decide how they were going to fight a war," according to Navy Captain Thomas Flanigan, an officer on the Pentagon's Joint Staff who helped to set it up. Flanigan described it as "extremely sobering."
The following day Perry, Shalikashvili, and Luck took the results of the meeting to the ultimate commander-in-chief at the White House. There Clinton was officially informed of the gravity and consequences of the conflict shaping up in Asia. If war broke out in Korea, his military leaders told him, they estimated it would cost 52,000 U.S. military casualties, killed or wounded, and 490,000 South Korean military casualties in the first ninety days, plus an enormous number of North Korean and civilian lives, at a financial outlay exceeding $61 billion, very little of which could be recouped from U.S. allies. This horrendous tragedy would be by far the gravest crisis of Clinton's sixteen-month-old presidency, overwhelming nearly everything else he had planned or dreamed of doing at home or abroad.
As the enormity of the consequences sank in, Clinton summoned a meeting of his senior foreign policy advisers the next day, May 20, to discuss the Korean confrontation. To the surprise of most journalists and experts who had been following the crisis-but who did not know about the nature or conclusions of the military meetings-the administration suddenly veered back toward diplomatic efforts, offering to convene its long-postponed third round of high-level negotiations with Pyongyang despite the unloading of the nuclear reactor.
North Korea signaled its interest in the U.S. offer by resuming working-level meetings in New York with State Department officials on May 23 to plan for the third round. But before progress could be made, the IAEA declared on June 2 that its ability to verify the reactor's