A second's notice is impractical - unless there's already a war underway, you'd be lucky to land strikes within a quarter hour. More likely effective would be counter-battery fire directed by radar, which we (and by extension South Korea) probably do as well as anyone in the world.

The most accurate counter-battery fire in the world can't take shells out of the air, though. Sufficiently well drilled and supplied NK gun crews would most likely be able to fire several rounds each before the first return fire arrived. And even if they weren't, at least one salvo would have to go out for the counter-battery radars to lay their guns at all, whereas the cities targeted by NK in this scenario don't move around much, and could be precisely targeted before the first fire mission commenced.

Twenty million in minutes is implausible. Twenty or thirty thousand isn't, and no preemptive option exists; to even hope to have a realistic shot at forestalling significant civilian casualties, we'd not only have to start the war nobody wants, but do it with utmost ferocity, crossing the DMZ like the Wehrmacht heading for the English Channel.

But even that wouldn't work; NK espionage assets would certainly notice the necessary concentration of force - all they'd have to do would be to watch the news stories about World War II-scale transports suddenly heading west across the Pacific from every military port on the US West Coast - and the NK regime, mad though it be, could hardly fail to draw the obvious conclusion and respond accordingly. There's no way in the modern world to achieve the kind of strategic surprise such blitzkrieg requires - not, at least, without pulling off the kind of deception that Tom Clancy wouldn't have dared write into a novel.

Everyone being aware of the dangers of, say, heart disease doesn't miraculously make a cure appear.

And within the game of MAD North Korea is playing against the US and South Korea, I'm pretty sure it would be beneficial for the US to publicise the ability to neutralise the threat against Seoul. Because that threat is what gives NK the safety to continue the development of nuclear weapons and ICBMs.

The only reason not to publicise such capabilities would be the possibility to, in turn, neutralise this "instant-reaction type airforce" (or whatever it may be). And I'm having a hard time coming up with any realistic scenario.

The only thing we could conceivably do is preemptively strike NK's line of artillery that spans across the entire country north of the DMZ. They would have to simultaneously detonate without detection though and I don't know of anything that can do that. Maybe a nuclear strike delivered from boomer subs, but that would still give warning. Of course that would get China involved and that wouldn't be pretty.

Here's some info including maps of their artillery range and capability.

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/how-north-korea-would...

As you say, if we had it, we'd say so. But we don't, and neither does anyone else. Artillery interception isn't as hard a problem as ballistic missile defense, but it's hard enough to still be at the stage of defense contractor proof-of-concept, which is to say, it has yet to progress beyond a rigged demo that still isn't reliable.

While I appreciate the optimistic thoughts, they do have thousands of seemingly well hidden and dispersed artillery pieces. Seems like the only way to prevent an attack would be with complete destruction of the area of North Korea that's within range of Seoul.

Unlikely. The terrain just north of the DMZ is heavily forested hills, with an unknowable but certainly immense amount of heavily fortified artillery installations with underground access. There's no known weapon system short of strategic nukes (which are not an option because Seoul would be in range) that could neutralize that threat before mass civilian casualties had occurred in Seoul. Bannon's estimate of 20 million is perhaps exaggerated, but probably not by that much.

> Bannon's estimate of 20 million is perhaps exaggerated, but probably not by that much.

It is exaggerated by two or three orders of magnitudes from most published estimates.

For that many people to die, the entire population of Seoul ( 10 million ) plus half that of the greater metropolitan area would have to move to the northern regions of the city within range of the North's artillery and the latter would have to be 100% fatal.

Even counting the population of cities between the DMZ and Seoul only adds two million.

One of my buddies described the C-RAM system, which is designed to do this [in small quantities]. Quite a crazy sight to see at night as the rounds explode in clouds eventually. It can provide intelligence back to counter-mortar teams to strike the location of the first strike.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwZE2vcmyFU&ab_channel=Notic...

Radar counter-battery fire isn't new. A workable artillery interceptor would be, and it would be a nice thing to have! But the urgent calls for counter-battery fire with which that video ends don't inspire confidence in the system.

The best effectiveness figures I've seen cited for C-RAM range from 60 to 70 percent. Leaving aside that these are Raytheon's figures and thus extremely untrustworthy - and leaving aside, too, that Phalanx guns eat through their magazines in an awful hurry, and require much manual effort and time to reload - that still leaves three or four out of every ten shells hitting whatever they're aimed at. If they're aimed at Seoul, that's not really solving the problem.

Yeah, he said that's why they were yelling in that video to get rounds on target... The c-ram only had a few seconds of fire before 'the tray' had to be reloaded. If he was on hn I'd have him post here, his stories are pretty incredible.

As my mother used to say, "Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first."

Because of the proximity of the two countries, what you hope for is logistically impossible. Traditional artillery can't be intercepted in the way your describing. Unless sabotaged beforehand(which is unlikely since North Korea is an intelligence services black hole), by the time we scramble a response to take out their artillery, the damage is done. Nukes are largely out of the question as well, unless you plan to blanket South Korea and Japan in radioactive fallout.

During the Vietnam war (or the American war, depending on your perspective) the North Vietnamese got very skilled at concealing artillery pieces, even inside caves, and then rolling them out, blasting off a few rounds, and whipping them away again.

I don't think there's currently any kind of instant-reaction force that could deal with the low tech threat of thousands of simple guns all firing simultaneously.

Well, except for nukes.

Artillery shells travel much faster than aircraft.

> I want to believe that since everyone, even common folk like you and I, are aware of that possibility, the militaries of South Korea and the US must have something in place to mitigate that

And NK has counter-counter-measures to those counter-measures. What about the world makes it that our side must win? History is littered - overflowing, really - with the bodies of the good guys.

I've recently read experts saying it would take over a day to eliminate the artillery. It's universally believed by such people, as far as I've read, that the damage to Seoul and its people would catastrophic.