Seoul’s dilemma over sunken warship

SINCE the end of World War II, only two navies, the British and the Pakistani, are known to have used a submarine to sink a battleship.
Now, though, there appears to be growing evidence that North Korea’s underwater fleet may have become the third.
The March 26 sinking of the Cheonan, with 40 lives lost and six men still missing, is certainly a South Korean military disaster.
But it has the potential to become much more than that.
If concrete proof of the North’s involvement is eventually produced, it would reinforce with shocking clarity just how easily this smouldering cold-war conflict could reignite. And, it would present the international community with a serious strategic challenge – how to send a message of deterrence without risking further escalation.
The shattered wreck of the 1,200-tonne gunboat has now been winched to the surface, in two pieces, and is being examined at a naval dockyard.
The investigation team includes American, Australian, Swedish and British experts, in part, to ensure its conclusions are seen as free from South Korean political influence. And, after an initial examination, the following observations and explanations were announced to the public.
nThe skin of the ship was bent inwards, pointing to an external rather than an internal explosion, a conclusion given further weight by the fact that the ship’s weapons storage area is intact;
nThere are no signs of scraping, or of a collision, ruling out the possibility that the ship ran aground; and
nThere is no evidence of soot or melting on the skin of the ship, suggesting that the external explosion took place some distance away from the hull.
Little wonder, then, that suspicion is mounting, with South Korean defence minister Kim Tae-young concluding that a torpedo attack is among the “most likely” causes.
An underwater non-contact explosion is exactly what many modern torpedoes are designed to produce, because the shock-wave from such a blast could cause much more damage than a direct hit. And North Korean submarines, capable of carrying these kinds of torpedoes, were known to have been operating off the Korean coast at the time of the sinking.
A further clue, perhaps, lies in the location of the blast, close to the gas turbine room, much of which was destroyed.
“Acoustic homing” torpedoes, of the kind North Korea was thought to possess, can track and target the engine noise from a ship.
The fact that there was no warning of an attack from the Cheonan’s radar operators did not necessarily make a torpedo strike unlikely.
The South Korean defence ministry has been quoted as saying that in the busy, shallow waters of the Yellow Sea, a torpedo fired from a range of 2km would have a 30% chance of remaining undetected.
In 1987, for example, while on patrol in the Persian Gulf, the USS Stark was struck by two anti-ship missiles, fired from an Iraqi fighter plane, neither of which was picked up by the ship’s radar.
But the torpedo theory is called into question by at least one aspect of the incident – there were no unusual military movements picked up from North Korean forces prior to the sinking.
If North Korea was planning a torpedo attack, knowing just how provocative such an action would be, would it not at least have boosted its naval defences?
The final question that should be asked is: What would North Korea have to gain from sinking a South Korean warship?
There is another explanation that could fit the scenario of an underwater, non-contact explosion and one favoured by the naval warfare expert, Norman Friedman.
“If it is a torpedo firing, then that’s about as big a thing as you can do short of rolling across the border,” he said.
“Unless you have a desire to start World War III, then you do not do it. That is why I put my money on a mine.”
Could the Cheonan have had the misfortune to run into one that had been lying undisturbed for more than half a century?