Why Guam?
The rhetoric between Trump and Kim Jong-Un on the plan of North Korea to fire a ballistic missile at Guam has been escalating these past few days, and some people are starting to worry that this is the beginning of a war with nuclear consequences. On August 15, Tuesday, North Korea will have an algorithm which will detail the firing of four nuclear-tipped Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles to within 25 miles from the shores of Guam. As of Saturday, August 12, Trump upped his counter threat to North Korea from "fire and fury" to his tweet that the U.S. military is "locked and loaded" on this Korean peninsula crisis. But why Guam, when South Korea is very near and Japan is surely closer than Guam?
Guam is a small island, 2,100 miles (3,400kms.) southeast of Korea. It is only 544 square kilometers with a population of 165,000. It is an unincorporated US Trust territory and has a US naval and air force base which occupies 29 percent of the island. The native Chamorros accounts for 34 percent of the inhabitants, Filipinos for 26 percent, the American military for 20 percent, the rest are other nationalities. As Chamorros are considered Americans and people born in the island are also Americans, more than 90 percent of Guamanians are Americans.
I was in Guam four years ago and I liked the place. The weather was pleasant, the beaches and the golf courses were fine and the people are friendly. With an annual per capita GDP of $34,000 in 2016, the average Guamanian was five times better off than us here in the Philippines even adjusted for "purchasing power parity". The main economic revenue of the island comes from tourism and the expenditures of the military bases. It gets more than a million tourists a year, majority of them Japanese. There is an SM store in their capital city of Agana, but the biggest store in the city is the K-Mart. I had a wonderful week in Guam which included visiting almost all of the tourist places, and would like to visit it again with my family.
The US, North Korea, and surely China understands the strategic importance of Guam. It is the staging ground for US stealth bombers that can reach the whole of Asia-Pacific including the Korean peninsula. It is also the foremost forward position, ahead of Hawaii, for the defense of continental US. For North Korea, targeting and reaching Guam will demonstrate in no uncertain terms, that their ICBMs are accurate and have the long-range capability, as Guam is a small island 3,400 kilometers from Pyongyang.
The North Korean plan is to fire four Huasong missiles out of the 12 missiles ready to Guam, crossing Japan and landing within 25 kilometers from Guam shores. Four, so that if there will be missile interceptors, like the THAAD deployed in South Korea or in Guam, or the PAC-3 in Japan, one of the four will get through. There is very low probability that the U.S. will initiate a preemptive strike as this will be geo-politically indefensible domestically and internationally. China has also warned of possible escalation if this happens. So, the US strategy will be a counterstrike, shooting down the missiles, and launching its own missiles at North Korea if it detects a nuclear warhead in the missiles.
At this time, there is only a 35-percent probability that North Korea will launch the missiles at Guam. The advisers of Kim would already have figured out the unfavorable "risk versus reward" equation outcome of such an adventure. So, for now, we should be able to rest easy and sleep well, but a lot of prayers will help as well.
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