Lethal weapons
The Pentagon may be about to reposition forces, including B-52 and B-1 bombers, as a bar to any North Korean military aggression amid rising tensions over that country's suspected nuclear weapons programme.
Ironically, a short-term build-up of forces in the region could come even as the Bush administration mulls a long-term reduction in the 'trip-wire' force of 37,000 US troops long maintained across the demilitarised zone in South Korea.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who last week denounced the North Korean government as 'terroristic', has put as many as 24 B-52 and B-1 bombers on alert for possible deployment to Guam along with surveillance aircraft, Pentagon officials said. Meanwhile, the US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson has been ordered to move towards the Korean peninsula to replace the Japan-based Kitty Hawk, the fifth carrier sent to within striking distance of Iraq.
In putting long-range bombers on alert, Mr Rumsfeld was aiming 'to make sure that North Korea doesn't do anything adventurous or dangerous of a military kind', Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on February 6.
He said North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's government was 'unpredictable' and 'seems to be moving along a ladder of escalation' since the US confronted it over a covert uranium enrichment programme begun in breach of a 1994 non-proliferation deal with Washington. The North, no slouch at brinkmanship and taking a page from Mr Bush's own play-book, claimed it was entitled to launch a pre-emptive strike against US interests rather than wait until the Pentagon may have polished off President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
The governing board of the UN's nuclear watchdog agency declared North Korea in breach of atomic safeguards on Wednesday, sending the crisis to the Security Council.
China's UN ambassador Wang Yingfan said council members would need to consult among themselves to determine the next steps on North Korea. 'So it might take some time,' he said.
US intelligence analysts foresee the possibility of major upheaval from the North's nuclear breakout. Vice-Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, called its suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons 'the most serious challenge to US regional interests in a generation'.
Still, US officials, facing growing anti-Americanism in South Korea, have been weighing a possible fundamental long-term shift in both the US military's peacetime presence in South Korea and plans for war, should the North strike across the 38th parallel.
Long-range planning will get under way in co-operation with Seoul after the February 25 inauguration of president-elect Roh Moo-hyun, who has requested a thorough review of the US-South Korean alliance.
The result may be 'a smaller, less visible, but more capable, force structure on the peninsula, resulting in greater strategic flexibility for US forces in Asia', said Peter Brookes, until September the Pentagon's top policymaker on East Asia and now at the Heritage Foundation. 'Capability is not measured in the number of soldiers but in the firepower and lethality of the deployed forces.'
