North Korea Features Fearsome Military

Wed Apr 30,11:28 AM ET

By GEORGE GEDDA, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - It is a country with 1.17 million military personnel, the world's fifth largest. Its air force has more than 1,700 aircraft and the navy more than 800 ships.

For all of the fuss about North Korea's spent fuel rods, reprocessing capabilities, plutonium stocks and other trappings of its nuclear weapons program, the country's conventional forces are fearsome as well.

An account of the North's overall capacity was provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee in March by Gen. Leon J. LaPorte, commander of the U.S. military in Korea.

LaPorte said North Korea's ground force is the world's third largest, with almost 1 million active duty soldiers and an estimated 6 million reserves.

"About 70 percent of the North Korean Army is deployed south of Pyongyang, where they are capable of attacking with very little tactical warning," he said. "The preponderance of the North Korean long range artillery force can strike Seoul from its current location."

Indeed, Seoul's proximity to the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea is a major worry for the South Korean government and its American partner. Still, the South Korean army of about 600,000 soldiers is far more technologically advanced and better trained that North Korea's. And the South has 37,000 U.S. troops permanently based there to back them up.

As LaPorte noted, Chairman Kim Jong Il has a "military first" policy, meaning that all other budget items must take a back seat to the armed forces. About a third of the country's national wealth is devoted to the military, leaving almost everything else starved for funds. Even so, the military lacks the fuel and other resources it takes to train as regularly as the U.S. and South Korean forces.

North Korrea is heavily dependent on outside donations — especially from the United States — for food. Harald Maass, a German reporter who visited North Korea, told a conference in South Korea in March that "what we saw was an emaciated country on the brink of a breakdown."

But the military thrives, at both the conventional and unconventional levels, according to LaPorte.

"North Korea maintains a substantial chemical weapons stockpile and a production capability that threatens both our military forces and civilian population centers in South Korea and Japan," he said.

In addition, he said, North Korea has the capability "to develop, produce and potentially weaponize biological warfare agents."

Beyond that, LaPorte said North Korea continues to produce and deploy medium-range missiles capable of striking cities in the western United States and Japan.

"Continued research on a three-stage variant of these missiles will provide North Korea the capability to target all of North America," LaPorte said.

The most benign explanation for all this comes from Daniel Pinkston, a Korea expert at the Monterey Institute for International Studies.

The North Koreans, he said, "believe they are under threat, they are very insecure, and they view the threat as coming from the U.S."

As a basis for the North's insecurity, he cites the administration's National Security Strategy report, issued last year.

It said the United States must be prepared to stop North Korea and other "rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends."

At present, the administration's focus is on North Korea's nuclear programs. At a U.S.-North-Korea-China meeting last week in Beijing, Pyongyang's chief delegate, Ri Gun, offered to scrap his country's nuclear weapons programs and missiles in return for large-scale assistance as well as security guarantees.

It is not clear how any North Korean promise to eliminate its nuclear weapons program would be verified. Locating forbidden weapons in post-Saddam Iraq has not been easy; one can only imagine what weapons sleuthing would be like in security-obsessed North Korea.

For starters, the United States has no idea where the North's uranium-based nuclear weapons program is. Officials are better informed about its plutonium-based program.

Lack of trust infects the relationship. Can a country with a "military first" policy be trusted to disarm, officials ask, especially after having ignored previous commitments not to arm itself in the first place?

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