The new old war in Korea

[Lissa]

The KN-2-Toska is said to be very accurate and has a fairly good range for a short range missile. NK is also said to have a good number of them. They could easily be used to do some damage to air fields making them unusable.

By "fairly good range", you mean 110 Km. That couldn't hit 80% of South Korea, and it wouldn't come even close to hitting targets on the southeast coast. For that, they need their modified Scuds, and the accuracy on those things is terrible.

-Jester

Edit: Perhaps I don't have the right missile - I hardly get any results for "KN-2 Toska" in google. Is there a different KN-2?

Edit of Edit: Ah! Toksa! And yes, it's a piece of junk, relative to what they'd need for what you're proposing. And they have 50 of them - even if they bullseyed every runway, they wouldn't do enough damage.

It's not just the Toska though, the Hwasong 6 can almost hit the Japanese coast and they have roughly 700 of them. While the CEP isn't great (50m), they have enough to cause general issues with any number of air fields in South Korea. Here is as complete a list of the NK Missile Inventory that is readily available to us. NK's ICBM suck, but a few of their short and medium range missiles aren't bad.

Hm, I'm certainly no expert on missile technology, but just from the information found after following up on your link (nothing in the paragraphs you linked said anything about NK missile accuracy regarding runways or similar structures, by the way), it would appear that NK has a lot of ballistic missiles with inertial guidance systems, which are, from what I've read, nowhere near accurate enough to reliable cripple South Korean airbases.

Inertial guidance systems can be quite accurate. I don't know of another system that would be suitable for war missiles (ballistic or cruise). The EMP from one big high altitude nuke can take out almost all the ground based and a lot of the space based electronics.

However, quite accurate is a relative term. Runways are small targets. Twenty years ago, I would have expected a CEP (circular error probable) of about 15 to 20 meters. Roughly speaking, that means three or four missiles per runway to get one crater. Runways are also pretty hard targets. A handy pile of gravel, a bulldozer, and some PSP, and that runway can be back in service in a matter of hours.

Right, but the time waiting for that could be enough for the first striking force. Even with as dilapitated as the NK air force is, if they can have a couple hours of free reign, it might help them get a solid push and keep SK and US forces on the defensive.

However, quite accurate is a relative term. Runways are small targets. Twenty years ago, I would have expected a CEP (circular error probable) of about 15 to 20 meters. Roughly speaking, that means three or four missiles per runway to get one crater. Runways are also pretty hard targets. A handy pile of gravel, a bulldozer, and some PSP, and that runway can be back in service in a matter of hours.

Plus, I would add that it's not like South Korea has 5 bases and each one has one runway or something. This link shows that they have quite a few airbases and to reach the level of being completely pinned down that Lissa is proposing a significant number of those would need to be shut down.

With over 700 missiles available TD, the NKs could easily throw 25 missiles at any of the bases and dual use runways and still have plenty for the auxilary runways (that appear to be hardened roadways). That would be enough to cause enough damage to shutdown the SK and US air forces in Korea until the runways are repaired. And given it will take atleast an hour for planes to get on station from either the US carriers in the region or from the US bases in Japan and Okinawa, it's not that much of a stretch.

Lissa, overall I think you're just reaching too far. You're assuming that basically everything goes right for North Korea and that everything goes poorly for South Korea. A couple of those assumptions might be ok on their own but to assume that Seoul would be in flames and every South Korean runway disabled within the initial salvo, South Korea has no planned response for such an obvious North Korean initial attack and the US and South Korea were caught by surprise and are completely unprepared for the attack seems just shy of impossible.

Maybe, the thing is, if NK is going to first strike, it's going to be an alpha which means they're going to throw everything along with the kitchen sink at SK to disable and destroy as much of SKs forces as possible. I don't think that is too far of an assumption. How well the alpha strike goes over is something else entirely, but the concept of the first strike from NK isn't out of hand. And yes, I'm sure the SK and US forces have planned and made contingencies, it's more a matter of how well NK executes (and evidently, since 2000, the NK has been picking up their training.


Also, here's an article I came across. Not sure if it's propaganda or not (it's written by a Korean, not sure if they're North or South), but it is an interesting read and shows some of the North's capabilities.