Direct attacks with cannons or rockets on Seoul is simply terror and ineffective for military reasons
Sure. It would be almost entirely about terror. Lobbing the shells in to the city won't destroy it, or noticeably effect the South Korean military.
As such it would actually reduce the military potential of the North in any war. Every shell lobbed in to the city at nothing in particular, just trying to kill civilians, is a shell not fired on a military target or civilian target that provides important support for the military effort.
Shelling residential areas rather than militarily important targets is a little like what the Luftwaffe did in the Battle of Britain. They might have won if they had staid focused on airfields (and had they made more attacks on the radar towers), but they shifted to terror bombing cities.
Other SCUD targets are Osan Air base, Suwon Air base and of course Pusan the southern port city where reinforcements and staging would occur.
With the SCUDs (well also perhaps with North Korean artillery, particularly at long range), and probably with their other missiles, your just hitting an area. They would have to get lucky to take out an important target, or kill significant numbers of their enemy, at least if their using conventional warheads.
The SCUDs can't reach Okinawa, but they have other longer range missiles that can. Rodong/Nodong -2s, and Taepodong's (both are derived from Scuds but are have added stages and such).
Could they put nukes on the missiles? They could carry nukes, but I'm not so sure they have developed small enough warheads. (And of course if they did use nukes it would be the end of the North Korean regime, and possibly much of North Korea). Using nerve gas and other chemicals on the missiles is certainly possible. Either steps up the severity of the missile threat quite a bit.
There is no denying they can kill millions without much effort
If they can deliver their nukes effectively, that certain. If not, well several hundred missiles, and thousands of long range artillery shells carrying nerve gas might possibly do the trick, at least after you add in conventional artillery, and attack of their forces across the land, but perhaps hundreds of thousands might be a more reasonable estimate than millions, at least if the defense performs up to expectations.
he Han river runs through the middle of Seoul and the north built a massive dam up river which could wipe out huge areas of the city.
I had not really considered that. Flooding Seoul would create a huge mess, which would be made worse by the fact that the country would have to concentrate on the war (and on dealing with chemical weapons and such), and so couldn't put its full weight behind rescue and restoration efforts. I don't feel competent to give any sort of specific numbers of deaths from such a scheme. |
