Korea

Avoiding Apocalypse on the Korean Peninsula

Diplomacy is not appeasement

U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis remarked that a war with North Korea would be “tragic on an unbelievable scale.”

No kidding. “Tragic” doesn’t even begin to describe the horrors that would flow from such a conflict. The Korean peninsula, all 85,270 square miles of it, is about the size of Idaho. It contains more soldiers and arms — 2.8 million troops, not counting reserves, plus nearly 6,000 tanks, 31,000 artillery pieces and 1,134 combat aircraft — than any other place on the planet.

The armies of North and South Korea face each other across the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ. And Seoul, South Korea’s capital, is a mere 35 miles away as the artillery shell flies. More than 25 million people inhabit that city’s greater metropolitan area, home to about half of South Korea’s population.