The United States is insufficiently prepared to handle a conflict on the Korean peninsula in which Pyongyang deploys a tactical nuclear weapon against the South, according to a new Pentagon-sponsored tabletop exercise.
The department’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency sponsored the Atlantic Council’s Guardian Tiger III tabletop exercise, which sought to assess U.S. and allies’ readiness and the challenges they would face if North Korea were to employ a limited nuclear attack.
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“The threat of limited nuclear attack is very real and far more realistic in our assessment, in our view, than the idea of a major all-out nuclear attack that would be against population centers,” Markus Garlauskas, the principal investigator for the exercise, told reporters during a Defense Writers Group event on Wednesday.
Tabletop exercises are designed to simulate potential real-world scenarios to estimate how each party may react in a given situation, with attention paid to how one decision could have a cascading effect on how a conflict plays out.
In Guardian Tiger III, the simulation starts off with a North Korean attack against South Korea’s northwest islands, which incurs a strong South Korean response, leaving North Korea to further escalate. So they decide to sink a South Korean warship off the east coast in international waters using an autonomous torpedo with its “disco ball” nuclear warhead.
The scenario is not too far-fetched, considering that on March 26, 2010, a North Korean submarine sank the South Korean Navy corvette Cheonan. The vessel sank, and more than 40 South Korean service members were killed. Even though North Korea denied involvement, a South Korea-led team of international investigators concluded that the ship was destroyed by a North Korean torpedo.
The tabletop exercise scenario is a little different because there was no active ongoing conflict between the two sides in 2010.
“In this case, they sunk a ship with a nuclear weapon,” Garlauskas added. “Now this is in the context of, again, there’s already an ongoing conflict, so it’s not quite the same situation. But keep in mind, it’s very difficult at this point for the alliance to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to go to an all-out war to end the North Korean regime, because they sank a ship with a nuclear weapon, right?’ So, it creates a political and operational dilemma for the United States and South Korea.”
The U.S. and South Korean forces, in the exercise, subsequently destroyed the Kim family villa complex at Wonsan, and in turn, North Korea uses a thermonuclear (“peanut”) nuclear airburst over the Liancourt Rocks, which are a group of islets in the Sea of Japan.
He continued: “It’s a very sparsely populated island, doesn’t really achieve any significant military effects, but of course, it creates a real significant political dilemma in how to respond. This is different than an underwater detonation. This is now the Korean government, considering the land of South Korea has actually been attacked by North Korea. But again, is it at this point worth the risk, worth the cost of going all the way to ending the regime, knowing that if you try to end the North Korean regime, that it might actually result in even further nuclear escalation.”
The two sides continue to engage in retaliatory and escalatory attacks on one another, with North Korea conducting large-scale missile and drone attacks, including with one very low-yield nuclear weapon, on Osan Air Force Base, rendering it non-mission capable. The situation continues to spiral.
Now the U.S. and South Korea launch a limited conventional nuclear counterattack and give North Korean leader Kim Jong Un one last chance to avoid escalation going to new levels, only for his forces to carry out an attack with multiple nuclear short-range ballistic missiles armed with tactical nuclear weapons targeting Kunsan air base.
With Kim’s rejection, the U.S. and South Korea decide to carry out strikes on North Korea’s nuclear command and control and their nuclear forces with the goal of ending his regime, though Pyongyang carries out its pre-planned and pre-delegated retaliation that, if faced with an existential threat, could be far greater than anything they’ve done in the simulation up to this point.
“We’re talking about literally dozens, if not hundreds, of targets in North Korea, and that’s going to cause significant collateral damage, et cetera. But the alliance makes the choice to do that,” Garlauskas said.
“In the case that Kim Jong Un is killed or the command and control is knocked out of the nuclear forces, this is the nuclear counter strike that the forces are ordered to execute,” he added. “And so this includes attacking ballistic missile defense systems in Alaska, Kadena Air Base in Japan, Anderson Air Force Base in Guam, Pearl Harbor, Omaha, STRATCOM, Strategic Command Headquarters, and then attacking U.S. and South Korean command and control on the peninsula.”
In tabletop exercises, every decision is its own variable that can impact the rest of the simulation, but they can provide useful insights into allied and enemy shortcomings, exposure, and possible advantages. For example, in Guardian Tiger III, Russia and China provided non-lethal aid to North Korea but did not get directly involved militarily, though the response from both Moscow and Beijing would have a significant impact on how the conflict could play out.
“I think the No. 1 most important thing is to make absolutely clear to all of our adversaries, and particularly to North Korea, because they’re the ones who are most likely to reach for nuclear weapons in extremis, that this is something that we are actively thinking about and preparing for, and that the use of a nuclear weapon or the attack with a nuclear weapon in a limited or unusual way, like an underwater nuclear detonation,” Garlauskas added.
Ensuring the U.S. is prepared for this possibility is not only about the military or military resources, which need improvements, he said, adding that the government needs to do a better job at informing the public about possible threats or scenarios. For the military, the Atlantic Council’s recommendations include developing a deeper and broader understanding of the risks of a limited nuclear attack and being able to articulate it to troops, the executive and legislative branches of government, and allies.
“It was clear that most of the participants hadn’t really spent a whole lot of time thinking about this, and we’re psychologically unprepared for the dilemmas that this would create,” Garlauskas continued.
Participants in Guardian Tiger exercises I, II, and III were hesitant to approve the use of an American nuclear weapon in response to an adversary’s use of a small tactical nuclear weapon, Lauren Gilbert, the deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Indo-Pacific Security Initiative, who was also a part of the tabletop exercise, added.
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Garlauskas was hesitant to describe the U.S. representatives of being “self-deterred,” when asked by the Washington Examiner, but said, “I would say there were definitely people who participated in the tabletop exercise who had that characterization that we’re self-deterring.”
Garlauskas was appointed to the Senior National Intelligence Service as the National Intelligence Officer for North Korea on the National Intelligence Council from July 2014 to June 2020. Before that, he served for nearly 12 years overseas at the headquarters of United Nations Command, Combined Forces Command, and U.S. Forces Korea in Seoul.
