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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.

That assumes that everyone in Seoul politely stays where they are in every building they're in and calmly waits to die.

And the number of tubes that can hit Seoul numbers a few hundred. To get more tubes on Seoul assumes the DPRK makes progress in an invasion and would require moving artillery forward in the open; I submit they won't have much success in getting anywhere.

And I also submit the mass casualty ability of chemical weapons, even against civilians, is somewhat overstated.

Any of the infamous tunnels they pop out of are gonna get the exits closed by bombs VERY quickly.

I'm always DEEPLY suspicious of "casualty" (of course casualties ALWAYS mutate into "deaths" in the media) that are nice round numbers, like 1 million. I don't think that number is the result of anything resembling a valid analysis.

The casualty figures are plausible, its just the methods are not.

You make several excellent points here. All that I would add to your argument is the mayhem which would be caused by PDRK infiltrators in the early hours of an attack. North Korea places an inordinate emphasis on its very large special forces, and has demonstrated the absolute ease with which its agents can infiltrate across (beneath) the DMZ. Seoul would be a very miserable place in the event of war.