Line Starts to the Left

Pretty harrowing stuff here...

There's an article up at the Atlantic detailing how an evacuation of foreign citizens and noncombatants would proceed if things went all to hell on the Korean peninsula.

Even under the best conditions, a mass evacuation is no easy task. In July 2006, as a battle brewed between Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah militants, the U.S. took nearly a month to evacuate 15,000 Americans. According to the Government Accountability Office, "nearly every aspect of State's preparations for evacuation was overwhelmed", by the challenge of running an evacuation under low-threat conditions in a balmy Mediterranean summer.

Bear in mind, there may be 140,000 American non-combatants and citizens on the peninsula. Also...Well, it snows there.

On paper, everything looks good, but as Korean tensions increase, the U.S. will have to get serious about evacuation planning. A successful wartime evacuation of the Korean peninsula can be done, and has been before. Sixty years ago this month, as Chinese troops pushed United Nations forces back from the Chinese border, an international fleet of 193 ships rescued around 196,000 soldiers and Korean refugees from Hungnam over just two weeks. However, modern-day evacuees would be far slower and more cumbersome than the well-trained amphibious force that made the Hungnam operation possible. Instead, the evacuation will be more like Dunkirk, where, largely unbidden, a disorganized fleet raced into threatened, shattered harbors to pull whomever they could to safety.

What's interesting (not to mention ironic), is that in then end, we'd probably have to end up relying on the Chinese for shipping out a lot of the refugees. Presents a political issue, no?

A Chinese rescue fleet poses a political, operational and symbolic headache for South Korea, the U.S., and Japan. Chinese assistance with a Korean evacuation would be an enormous political coup for Beijing. Even modest Chinese support during a high-profile humanitarian emergency could do a lot to blunt wider Asian concerns over China's naval expansion and territorial ambitions. And in the case of the Philippines, a timely humanitarian gesture by the People's Liberation Army's Navy would strengthen Chinese influence there and maybe even reconcile a festering territorial dispute over their contested South China Sea islets - to China's favor. But the defenders of South Korea would not have any other choice than to ask for China's assistance. No other help is available.