For days there was widespread speculation that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un have have been incapacitated following alcohol-related stress, but he turned up at a fertilizer plant late in the week, according to published reports in state media.
During that time, however, U.S. and South Korean officials were no doubt planning for the worst: The death of the authoritarian leader followed by uncertainty over his likely successor, sister, Kim Yo-jong, or even chaos within the country.
But if Kim had perished or become incapacitated, what would become of the country’s likely cache of nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them he’s bragged about in the past?
“Turns out, there is a plan in place and it’s part ‘Cops’ and part ‘Mission Impossible,’” Fox News reported, adding:
Operations Plan 5029, or OPLAN 5029, was prepared for a scenario when a sudden shift in power or massive instability occurred in North Korea – something that could happen if Kim was sick or removed from power and his sister, Kim Yo Jong, wasn’t able to step in.
The U.S.-South Korean contingency plan, created in 2008 among heightened tensions from Pyongyang’s missile launch, addresses everything from securing the border to sending in secret operatives to find Pyongyang’s nuclear stockpile and prevent it from being used, stolen or sold to the shadiest bidder.
“The million-dollar question is: When do you invoke the OPLAN and what indicators do you rely on to do so? Because one country’s ‘securing the country’ operation can look to the other nation like an ‘invasion plan.’ And then all hell can break loose,” Vipin Narang, a North Korea nuclear specialist at MIT, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
The OPLAN was created following a request from then-South Korean President Lee Hyuang-bak. He asked the U.S. and South Korea’s Combined Forces Command to put together a plan that could be implemented at a moment’s notice in response to a suddenly unstable North Korea that could be plagued further by widespread civil disobedience, refugees, and a collapsing economy.
A 2015 RAND Corp. report notes that a big point of concern is whether the United States would have a large enough troop presence to help lead in a post-Kim North Korea.
According to the report, which studied troop size requirements, the U.S. would likely need some 850,000 military personnel through most of the services — Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force — including some 160 ships and 2,000 aircraft, all of which would need to be moved rapidly to the Korean peninsula.
The large presence would be necessary in order to secure and remove all weapons of mass destruction and any materials with “enough fissionable plutonium and uranium to build up to 75 weapons by 2020,” the report noted.
A decade ago, U.S. and South Korean forces agreed that if North Korea suddenly became unstable, the U.S. would take the lead in securing and then eliminating all WMD.
That said, Ralph Cossa, president emeritus of the Pacific Forum think tank in Hawaii, believes the U.S. focus should be solely on North Korea’s suspected nuclear weapons cache.
“Beyond that, it makes little sense for the U.S. and/or South Korea to get involved in internal North Korean power struggles,” he said, Fox News reported.
The one complicating factor is this: China would most likely send in its own forces, either to attempt to secure North Korea’s weapons or to set up humanitarian operations — or both.
“China is better positioned than the rest of us if a succession crisis happened, but even China has few inroads and limited leverage,” Van Jackson, a former senior defense official for Korea policy told the Asia Times.
Gordon Chang, a foreign policy expert and noted China critic, said he wasn’t sure that the U.S. could pull off the OPLAN.
“I wonder whether we are able to implement OPLAN 5029 at this moment, especially with China engaging in a series of provocations in its peripheral waters,” he said. “We are stretched thin now, and coronavirus has decreased readiness.”
Meanwhile, David Straub, a former State Department official, told Asia Times that despite having plans in place to respond to a crisis in North Korea, “military plans, and especially 5029, depend fundamentally on lots of assumptions, including about what the American president will want to do.”
