According to the most commonly accepted estimates, the bombing of Hiroshima killed about 140,000 people, roughly 90,000 outright, and the rest over the next year.
If the North Koreans attacked South Korea with massed artillery already locked and loaded, US intelligence sources estimate the death toll at about 200,000 within a few hours, most within what those same intelligence sources chillingly call the Seoul "Kill Box." In other words, North Korea's conventional artillery would indiscriminately kill more people than the atomic bomb killed at Hiroshima.
Since North Korea's massed artillery is not a nuclear, biological, chemical or radiological weapon, we do not publicly consider it a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Unless the North also used chemical or biological weapons, the North would devastate the South before we could respond effectively.
If that happened, the US could only hope that South Korean and US forces would be able to hold on until we could mobilize our own conventional forces for a counterattack
Although it was first used to describe the German use of mass bombing on Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, the US has habitually used the term "Weapons of Mass Destruction" to include only nuclear, radiological, biological and chemical weapons. But in 2003, Lake Superior State University proposed that it be banned for overuse, misuse and abuse. According to the University's web page "Many nominators point out that any weapon, used effectively, does a lot of destruction. 'A few thousand machetes in the hands of an army in Africa can lead to mass genocide,' writes Howard Stacy of Atlanta, Georgia."
By limiting the definition of WMD to nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological weapons only, we are playing into North Korea's strategy of permanent brinksmanship. Given the North's increasingly hostile and erratic behavior, we could find ourselves in another war that will take too long, and cost too much to win. The North Koreans seem to know this and think they can keep pushing us and their neighbors with no fear of bringing about their own demise.
We might be able to trump this strategy - and its resulting behavior - by letting the North Koreans know that we would consider a massed artillery attack on the South, with or without the other traditional WMDs, to be an attack with Weapons of Mass Destruction on a civilian population, and would respond in kind.
In 2003, Philip Yun, former staff representative for former Secretary of Defense William Perry, made this assessment of the perceptions that the US and North Korea have of each other, and that the North Koreans seem to have of everyone else. On the North Korean side, things seem to have only gotten worse, which makes it unlikely that they would take our new position seriously.
But the Chinese, increasingly impatient with their unpredictably dangerous neighbor, could take it VERY seriously.
