South Korea plans ‘decapitation unit’ to scare North’s leaders

SEOUL — The last time South Korea is known to have plotted to assassinate the North Korean leadership, nothing went as planned.

In the late 1960s, after North Korean commandos tried to ransack the presidential palace in Seoul, South Korea secretly trained misfits plucked from prison or off the streets to sneak into North Korea and slit the throat of its leader, Kim Il-sung. When the mission was aborted, the men mutinied.

They killed their trainers and fought their way into Seoul before blowing themselves up, an episode the government concealed for decades.

Now, as Kim’s grandson, Jong-un, accelerates his nuclear missile programme, South Korea is again targeting the North’s leadership. A day after North Korea conducted its sixth – and by far most powerful – nuclear test earlier this month, South Korean Defence Minister Song Young-moo told lawmakers in Seoul that a special forces brigade defence officials described as a “decapitation unit” would be established by the end of the year.

The unit has not been assigned to literally decapitate North Korean leaders. But that is clearly the menacing message South Korea is trying to send.

Defence officials said the unit could conduct cross-border raids with retooled helicopters and transport planes that could penetrate North Korea at night.

Rarely does a government announce a strategy to assassinate a head of state, but South Korea wants to keep the North on edge and nervous about the consequences of further developing its nuclear arsenal.

At the same time, the South’s increasingly aggressive posture is meant to help push North Korea into accepting President Moon Jae-in’s offer of talks.

It is a difficult balancing act, pitting Mr Moon’s preference for a diplomatic solution against his nation’s need to answer an existential question: How can a country without nuclear weapons deter a dictator who has them?

“The best deterrence we can have, next to having our own nukes, is to make Kim Jong-un fear for his life,” said Mr Shin Won-sik, a three-star general who was the South Korean military’s top operational strategist before he retired in 2015.

The measures have also raised questions about whether South Korea and the United States, the South’s most important ally, are laying the groundwork to kill or incapacitate Mr Kim and his top aides before they can even order an attack.

While US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said America does not seek leadership change in North Korea, and the South Koreans say the new military tactics are meant to offset the North Korean threat, the capabilities they are building could be used pre-emptively.

Last week, US President Donald Trump agreed to lift payload limits under a decades-old treaty, allowing South Korea to build more powerful ballistic missiles. The US helped South Korea build its first ballistic missiles in the 1970s, but in return, imposed restrictions to try to prevent a regional arms race.

“We can now build ballistic missiles that can slam through deep underground bunkers where Kim Jong Un would be hiding,” Mr Shin said.

“The idea is how we can instill the kind of fear a nuclear weapon would – but do so without a nuke. In the medieval system like North Korea, Kim Jong-un’s life is as valuable as hundreds of thousands of ordinary people whose lives would be threatened in a nuclear attack.”

Mr Moon has vowed to expand the defence budget to 2.9 per cent of South Korea’s gross domestic product during his term, from 2.4 per cent, or US$35.4 billion (S$47.8 billion), as of this year. For next year, his government has proposed a budget of US$38.1 billion, nearly US$12 billion of it for weapons to defend against North Korea.

In a Twitter post last Tuesday, Mr Trump said: “I am allowing Japan & South Korea to buy a substantially increased amount of highly sophisticated military equipment from the United States.”

South Korea has now introduced three arms-buildup programmes – Kill Chain; Korea Air and Missile Defence programme; and the Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation initiative, which includes the decapitation unit.

Under the Kill Chain program, South Korea aims to detect impending missile attacks from North Korea and launch pre-emptive strikes.

North Korea keeps artillery and rocket tubes near the border, and is capable of delivering 5,200 rounds on Seoul in the first 10 minutes of war, military planners in South Korea say. The North also operates hundreds of missiles designed to hit South Korea and US bases in Japan and beyond to deter US intervention should war break out.

Last month, South Korea said it would launch five spy satellites into orbit from 2021 to 2023 to better monitor weapons movements in North Korea. In the interim, it is talking with countries like France and Israel to lease spy satellites. It also plans to introduce four U.S. RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drones by next year.

If pre-emptive attacks failed, South Korea would hope its Korea Air and Missile Defence initiative would shoot down any rockets from the North.

South Korea is planning to upgrade its PAC-2 interceptor missiles for a better low-altitude defence. Last week, South Korea helped the US military install a Thaad missile-defense battery, which intercepts enemy rockets at higher altitudes. For additional protection, South Korea is developing its own L-SAM interceptor missiles, as well as installing more early-warning radars for ballistic missiles.

After the North’s latest nuclear test, South Korea fired its Hyunmoo-2 short-range ballistic missiles in a drill simulating an attack on the North’s test site. In July, the South’s military also released simulated images of Taurus bunker-buster missiles hitting the defense ministry in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. South Korea is buying 260 Taurus missiles from a German and Swedish joint venture.

The weapons are part of the Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation plan. Under that program,e, South Korea would try to divide Pyongyang into several districts and wipe out the area where Mr Kim is believed to be hiding, defence analysts said.

Washington’s decision to lift the missile payload limits may allow South Korea to develop new Hyunmoo missiles capable of destroying weapons sites and leadership bunkers deep underground, said Mr Shin Jong-woo at Korea Defense Forum, a Seoul-based network of military experts.

Shin said there was talk of building a Hyunmoo with a two-ton warhead.

The earlier restrictions barred South Korea from attaching a payload weighing more than half a ton to its Hyunmoo missile when the rocket had a range of up to 800km.

As word of South Korea’s new assassination plans has spread, Mr Kim has used his deputies’ cars as decoys to move from place to place, South Korean intelligence officials told lawmakers in June.

Still, many say they doubt that the threat is enough to deter Mr Kim. Only the prospect of nuclear retaliation will suffice, they say.

“The balance of terror is the shortest cut to deterring war,” Mr Yoon Sang-hyun, a conservative opposition lawmaker, told South Korea’s Parliament last Tuesday. THE NEW YORK TIMES