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I know I've mentioned this before but I have to harp on this as every single article about Korea now has some insanely high figure for South Korean civilian casualties...

But I think they're WILDLY inflated. The amount of DPRK artillery that can actually hit Seoul from behind the DMZ is a lot less than people think.

And there's no freaking way a million people are going to be killed in Seoul by shelling in a few days, as most articles seem to imply.

Even mass firebombing of people in flammable houses by the US in WWII couldn't kill more than 100,000 at a time.

And there's no freaking way a million people are going to be killed in Seoul by shelling in a few days, as most articles seem to imply.

For crying out loud, they're talking about his deliverable nuclear warheads, not his artillery. He's got two of them already, and he's going to be able to start mass producing them within the next several months.

The casualty figures are plausible, its just the methods are not. You are correct in noting that a few hours of shelling won't produce as many casualties as the author is talking about.

That having been said, artillery pounding densely packed cities will cause terrible casualties. A city with skyscrapers has never been shelled that heavily before, you'd see the whole skyline collapse in short order. Even so, the shells alone would only, like you said, probably kill off one or two hundred thousand before they could get out of town.

Many casualties will come from chemical weapons. If you have any notion that North Korea won't use them for some reason, part with it immediately. Their doctrine calls for persistant strikes in population centers south of Seoul, and non-persistant strikes on troop and civil concentrations in the path of their advance.

A massive refugee problem will soon erupt, and disease and starvation will claim many as food distribution networks on the densly populated peninsula break down. This is what generally kills off most civilians in war, anyways. If the war drags on for any amount of time, I'd expect to see civilian casualties (SK, that is) number around one million, if we could wrap it up in a few weeks, then it would be less.

"I know I've mentioned this before but I have to harp on this as every single article about Korea now has some insanely high figure for South Korean civilian casualties...

But I think they're WILDLY inflated. The amount of DPRK artillery that can actually hit Seoul from behind the DMZ is a lot less than people think.

And there's no freaking way a million people are going to be killed in Seoul by shelling in a few days, as most articles seem to imply.

Even mass firebombing of people in flammable houses by the US in WWII couldn't kill more than 100,000 at a time. "

Casualty estimates, are just that. Estimates. They don't know EXACTLY how many people are going to die. They just want to get within an order of magnitude or so. If they say 1 million, but it ends up being 952,347, big deal.

They may be overestimating the number of deaths significantly more than my example, but I still find it hard to see how this would be any less of a tragedy?

Oh, and the bombing of Dresden killed well over 250,000.