North Korea, Iran Might Use Nuclear ICBMs To Intimidate United States
Book Says Possibility of Attack Makes National Missile Defense ‘Attractive’
Even a small nuclear weapon from the North Korean arsenal would wreck devastating destruction and death in a missile attack on an American city, according to experts with a liberal think tank.
A single North Korean missile with a nuclear warhead striking a medium-density city such as Los Angeles, with the population spread over a large area, still would cause immense damage.
This assumes that the North Korean missile wouldn’t be an advanced, sophisticated system, but instead would be somewhat inaccurate.
If the missile missed Los Angeles entirely, perhaps the blast itself wouldn’t kill anyone.
But if the missile “landed on downtown [Los Angeles] at mid-day [it] could kill 250,000 people instantly and tens of thousands more in the days and weeks to follow,” according to a book published by The Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington think tank.
The book, “Defending America: The Case for Limited National Missile Defense,” was authored by James M. Lindsay and Michael E. O’Hanlon, senior fellows with Brookings.
“The death toll in a biological or nuclear attack from a single missile could easily exceed the total number of U.S. soldiers who died fighting the Korean War and would probably be comparable to the casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” when the United States used two atomic bombs to force Japan into the unconditional surrender that ended World War II.
“The prospect of wholesale slaught is what gives long-range missiles their coercive power,” the book notes. It observes that small nations with limited military powers nonetheless might — if they develop nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles — intimidate the United States, or so their leaders may believe.
Now, it is true that there could be a massive U.S. retaliatory strike against any nation launching nuclear-tipped missiles striking U.S. cities. But the book notes that with some small nations, that Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, calculation may not work.
“Deterrence might forestall an attack on the United States or its allies, but deterrence can fail,” the book observed. Therefore, that “possibility makes arguments for building a national missile defense attractive.”
The book then goes on to evaluate the costs and benefits of various approaches to developing and deploying a national missile defense shield.
Published by Brookings Institution Press in Washington, D.C., the book is available from Brookings at 1775 Massachusetts Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036, or though http://www.brookings.edu on the Web.