By Vernon Loeb and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, January 20, 2003; Page A16

As they have worked for years on the U.S. military's blueprint for a possible war with North Korea, OPLAN 5027, Pentagon war planners have spent enormous amounts of time figuring out how to destroy hundreds of deeply buried North Korean artillery systems.

But even as technology has improved to include precision-guided bombs, the planners have not overcome what retired Army Gen. John H. Tilelli Jr., former commander in chief of forces in Korea, called the "tyranny of proximity": powerful North Korean artillery systems and rocket launchers capable of inflicting massive casualties on the South Korean capital less than 40 miles away.

The lack of a military option has constrained White House diplomacy since the latest confrontation began in October, when North Korea confirmed U.S. intelligence that it was conducting a secret uranium enrichment program. Since then, undeterred by the United States and its allies, North Korea has reopened the plutonium-producing Yongbyon nuclear reactor, ousted international inspectors and announced its withdrawal from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that President Bush decided at the "very beginning" of the current confrontation to pursue diplomacy over force. Rice rejected comments made Saturday by South Korea's president-elect, Roh Moo Hyun, who said hard-liners in "very responsible positions" in the Bush administration "were talking about the possibility of attacking North Korea and the possibility of war."

In Seoul yesterday, Roh backtracked from those remarks. A spokesman said Roh had been referring to media accounts of Bush administration policy and had been misunderstood. Roh was "well aware" that Bush had no intention of attacking North Korea, spokesman Lee Nak-yeon said.

The administration concluded early that the potential price of a preemptive strike against North Korea's nuclear facilities would be "fearful," according to a senior military officer.

"The outcome of a war in Korea should not be in doubt, but it would be grim," said the officer, who has long experience in Korea. "You're fighting near a large urban area, and the human suffering would be pretty great."

Indeed, as potential adversaries go, North Korea is much that Iraq is not. It possesses a committed fighting force with massive firepower that, in recent years, has been moved closer to U.S. and South Korean forces deployed along the fortified Demilitarized Zone.

Seventy percent of North Korea's army of 1 million is within 100 miles of the border, along with 8,000 artillery systems and 2,000 tanks. Five hundred 170mm Koksan guns and 200 multiple-launch rocket systems, armed with chemical weapons, are within range of Seoul.

"The reach of these weapons is enormous," said retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., who served three tours in Korea. "Much of the North Korean army is in caves. And military operations against North Korea are extremely difficult for two reasons: the mountainous terrain and their ruthlessness. The one thing that absolutely needs to be emphasized is the respect we have for the fighting ability of the Koreans, both North and South."

North Korea's military strategy is designed to overwhelm South Korea and reunify the Korean Peninsula, building upon the shock of a massive opening artillery barrage coupled with large-scale special forces operations, according to U.S. assessments. CIA Deputy Director John E. McLaughlin noted in a recent speech that North Korea has "the biggest pool of special forces in the world."

North Korea's military doctrine embraces the use of chemical weapons as part of its invasion strategy. North Korea could have anywhere from 400 to 600 Scud missiles that could hit any target in South Korea with chemical weapons. It has 100 No Dong missiles capable of striking Japan. And it is trying to become the first Third World nation capable of striking parts of the United States with a long-range ballistic missile, the Taepo Dong 2.

But beyond all this is the greatest difference of all: North Korea is already believed to possess one or two crude nuclear bombs. Indeed, one of the administration's justifications for going to war with Iraq is to keep Iraq from joining the nuclear club.

"North Korea's got nuclear weapons," Scales said, "and that changes everything."

In 1993, shortly before the last crisis triggered by North Korea's then-unfulfilled quest for a nuclear bomb, a classified Pentagon estimate said a conventional war with North Korea would require four months of "very high-intensity combat" by more than 600,000 South Korean troops and about half a million U.S. reinforcements to the regular contingent of 37,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in South Korea, or about half the total U.S. fighting force.

Since then, in some respects, the trends have only deteriorated, according to Army Col. Dean A. Nowowiejski, a federal executive fellow at the Brookings Institution who served as a regional war planner in South Korea from 1995 to 1998. North Korea has been moving more and more troops and long-range artillery, with ever greater fortification, closer to the Demilitarized Zone.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld insisted last month that the U.S. military is "capable of fighting two major regional conflicts" in Iraq and North Korea. But the current buildup of forces in the Persian Gulf, and ongoing troop commitments in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Bosnia and Kosovo, would make the deployment of 500,000 troops and dozens of fighter squadrons to South Korea increasingly difficult.

Bush administration policymakers decided early in the standoff that began last fall that no good military solution existed, given the danger of triggering a larger war. As a result, officials knew they could not set terms for the North Korean government and threaten action if it did not comply.

At a mid-December meeting, said one official, the administration decided not to establish red lines for North Korea. The official explained, "North Korea would view that as a red flag and, like a charging bull, race past it . . . unless you're prepared to respond. And we don't have a military option."

U.S. allies in Japan and South Korea also have made clear that a preemptive military strike would be unacceptable.

Korea specialist Victor D. Cha participated in a war game recently in which he said events quickly "got out of control." The United States warned North Korea not to move its plutonium, so North Korea did so. U.S. forces struck the plutonium site and North Korea responded with an attack on Seoul.

A military strike on North Korea's nuclear facilities is "operationally feasible, but it's the costs that are really too high," said Cha, a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. "It doesn't look like it's worth the candle."

Cha recalled the words of Army Gen. Gary Luck, former chief of U.S. forces in Korea, when he was asked during a 1994 standoff with North Korea to estimate the potential consequences of full-scale war on the peninsula. Luck foresaw a million casualties, more than $100 billion in costs to the United States and a trillion dollars in economic damages and lost business.

In May 1994, Luck and the Pentagon leadership warned President Bill Clinton that war could leave 52,000 Americans dead or wounded in the first 90 days, former Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer reported in his book, "The Two Koreas."

Defense Secretary William J. Perry received detailed contingency plans for a disabling attack on the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, Oberdorfer reported. He was told that the U.S. Air Force could destroy the facilities effectively, without spreading radiation widely, but Perry feared the airstrike could start a broader war.