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International News Title: War on Korean Peninsula: High Tension Prompts Scenarios By BILL POWELL Bill Powell Wed May 26, 1:55 pm ET "A symphony of death." That's the chilling phrase that Kurt Campbell, who is now Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Obama Administration, once used to describe the likely outcome of any military encounter on the Korean peninsula between the U.S., its ally South Korea and their mutual enemy across the 38th parallel in the North. The possibility of war breaking out once again in Korea is so unthinkable that a lot of people in various military establishments - the Pentagon, South Korea's armed forces and China's People's Liberation Army - actually spend a lot of time thinking about it. The truce between North and South has lasted for 57 years, but a peace treaty has never been signed, and now, in the wake of the North's attack on a South Korean naval vessel - and the South's formal accusation that the Cheonan was sunk by a North Korean torpedo - tensions are at their highest level since 1994, when North Korea threatened to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire." Seoul has already made it clear that it will not seek military retaliation, and Washington and Beijing have said all the right things about trying to ensure that "cooler heads" prevail, as China's State Councilor, Dai Bingguo, said in talks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Beijing on Tuesday. But all concerned parties understand that at a moment of high tension, the possibility of hot war breaking out is not negligible. (See TIME's photo-essay "The Iconography of Kim Jong Il.") How might a shooting war start? Defense analysts and military sources in Seoul and Washington agree that an outright, all-out attack by either side is unlikely. Even a nuclear armed North, a Seoul-based defense analyst says, "would not risk an all-out war because it would be the end of the regime. Period, full stop." But there are ways in which smaller skirmishes could break out, and if they aren't contained, they could conceivably lead to disaster. Here are three that are uppermost in defense planners' minds: The West Sea Redux Loudspeakers at the DMZ var so = new SWFObject("http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_international/nkorea_history/content.swf?SITE=YAHOO", "content", "620", "525", "9", "#FFFFFF"); so.addParam("base","http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_international/nkorea_history/"); so.addParam("allowFullScreen","true"); so.addParam("allowScriptAccess","always"); so.useExpressInstall('http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/template_items/expressinstall.swf'); so.write("contentcontent"); Tit for Tat Getting Out of Hand The question is, Does North Korea know that, and if not, how to communciate the message? There is no hot line between Seoul and Pyongyang, and North Korea announced on Wednesday that it was shutting down a phone line run by the Red Cross in Panmunjom, the so-called truce village set up by the 1953 armistice. The danger here is obvious. The only open lines of communication are two that are affiliated with the train links between the Koreas (including a route to the Kaesong Industrial Zone, which the North has threatened to close). The only way now to get a message to the North about what the South will not tolerate going forward may be via the Chinese. Conveniently, China's Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, will head to Seoul on Friday for talks with Lee. North Korea will dominate that discussion. Let's hope they figure out how to keep Pyongyang in the loop.
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#1. To: Brian S (#0)
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New Link to this article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100526/wl_time/08599199192800 Pull all US troops from SO Korea. OPLAN call s for a commitment of 700,000 US troops if war breaks out. That's 5 Iraqs.
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