New Korean computer war game simulates 'March North'

By Edward Neilan

Frustration over North Korean delays, U.S. restraints and meddling stir interest in direct South Korean action.

TOKYO (JP): Have you seen the new Korean computer simulated war game called "Syngman Rhee's 'March North?'"

The game is all the conversational rage in Seoul coffee houses, is sold under the counter in Tokyo and is banned in Washington D.C.

Promotional flyers say the new game "goes beyond old simulations of 'North Korean Attack,' 'Pyongyang C&I (collapse and implosion),' and 'Peaceful Unification.'" The latter was the poorest-seller, removed from the shelves after a majority of scholars' predictions that unification would be achieved by 1996 proved false.

Interest in the game is running high, sociologists say, because of a final impatience over the repeated stalling-starting-stopping-provocation behavior pattern toward talks of the North Korean regime, which has proven costly to South Korea's development.

The new game harks back to the late 1950s when first South Korean President Syngman Rhee, characterized as being on an American "leash" somewhat like that said to be holding back Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan, told the United States to "stand aside, we'll 'March North' and unify our nation."

Rhee's premise, culled from old speeches and editorials which he inspired in The Korean Republic, the newspaper in Seoul which was the forerunner of today's Korea Herald, was "whose country is it, anyway?"

His reasoning went that since the United States was responsible for dividing the Korean Peninsula in the first place---with an arbitrary line scrawled on an old National Geographic map after World War II--that Washington had the responsibility to put the two halves back together.

Of course, Rhee probably was using the idea as a bargaining chip but it drove the U.S. State Department up the wall and caused consternation for U.S. Ambassador to Korea Walter "Red" Dowling.

It makes a good story and an even better war game--a hypothetical game to be sure. It helps to have relief to the boredom of endless academic and military expert simulations of the North's blitzkrieg encirclement of Seoul in eight hours, or saturation missile bombardment of South Korean by a lunatic, maverick North Korean colonel.

"Syngman Rhee's 'March North!'" computer simulated war game starts with South Korea diplomatically freezing Chinese, U.S., Russian and Japanese reaction. Easier said than done, perhaps since powerful forces in each of those countries would like Korea to remain perpetually divided.

South Korea's ambassador to the United States informs the White House that several ships are waiting at Inchon harbor to remove the 37,000 U.S. troops based in South Korea. A smaller vessel is standing by to give safe outward passage to representatives of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the various souvenirs they had bought at Itaewon.

Simultaneously, South Korean armies by land and sea surround the hundreds of thousands of North Korean troops massed near the Demilitarized Zone; these are the armies which the "North Korea Attack" war game simulation say are poised, invasion-ready,just across the line.

A second ROK force sweeps toward the capital of Pyongyang, passing through the city before going to Yongbyon, North Korea's nuclear site. Seoul draws a new demarcation line just north of Yongbyon and across to a spot north of the port of Wonsan, saying North Korea can "retain" the roughly one-third of the peninsula's territory north of the new line.

The line stopping north of Yongbyon was decided upon to give China less cause to worry. In fact, with U.S. forces gone, some Chinese planners ask Seoul in the game to go ahead and unify the peninsula, choking off a flood of refugees from the north into China.

"The North Koreans tried to unify the peninsula in 1950. Now we've done the job in 1999," says a South Korean spokesman in the war game.

Since it is all simulation, there are a variety of casualty projections. They range from very high to very low and some are less than the number of deaths believed to be caused by the North's preferential (to the military) food supplies, which cause civilian starvation.