As long as China didn’t get involved to help the North, says Robert E. Kelly, a professor at Pusan National University in South Korea, the Kim-controlled Korean People’s Army (KPA) would lose in a conventional ground war to the US and its allies within “six weeks, a month, two months max.”
Of course a two-way nuclear exchange would play out differently, but the US and its allies would be hesitant to use that option. “If we’re exchanging nukes across the peninsula then things have deteriorated to the point when all other options have been exhausted, and we’re in a very different world. But it’s not a path that I think they would use,” says Graham.
There would be “huge public anxiety” in the South about radioactive contamination, he notes, and even the US, despite its distance, could be affected by the fallout due to wind direction.
As for the North, it might not get a chance to even use its nukes.
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