"Since the US is about to ignite a nuclear war...Follow

If NK did manage to detonate a bomb it would still likely be no bigger than around 20 kilotons. America could respond with one around 15 megatons and call it a day.

Uninhabitable, right? Unless the radiation mutates the crops and turns the soil super fertile or something.



Thirteen Days. The Russians tried it back in the 60's and it didn't fly.

Whatever, I've played Homefront and seen Red Dawn. Obviously, if the North Koreans do decide to attack the US, they'll launch a full-scale invasion on the western border, but they'll only get to Chicago before being repelled by a handful of courageous teenagers lead by a former military man.

Completely unrelated, but I was having issues deciding when I wrote my last post. Do you use "see" or "watch" about watching/seeing a movie?

Confusing language (we just use one word for it - "se").

It's funny how two words, that essentially mean the same thing, can change the meaning of a sentence so much.

I see you. I watch you. One has a slightly creepy ring to it while the other was used as a romantic catchphrase in the highest grossing movie of all time.

Then there's the fun of one word meaning two things. "I'm a sex object. I ask for sex, and she objects."

North Korea doesn't have enough plutonium to lauch a large scale missile based nuclear attack. It takes roughly 4-8kg Plutonium to make a lightweight nuclear weapon. North Korea could possibly have up to 131 Kg Plutonium at their Yongbyon reactor, which is capable of prodicing about 6KW per year. they had 16KG in 1989, call it another 115 since then if they were operating full blast, for probably enough for 26-30 missile loads, assuming small payloads.Thats assuming they were running full out every year they possibly could have, which we don't think they were. I personally would put it closer to 10 at the outside. Which either way would be bad, but is nowhere near enough to impede the military strenght of the United States. mainly because as soon as we saw them opening up their missile silos, we would nuke the crap out of them with the ICBM submarines we keep nearby, and China would probably help nuke them at that point maybe even before we did. We've never seen North Korea sucessfully test an implosion based plutonium weapon yet either. They probably have the designs, and they probably even built some, but I would doubt they have anything flight tested or ready to go in quantity. Implosion triggers are tricksy stuff, and making a nucelar weapon that will withstand a rocket launch is even trickier.

North Korean missiles are basically crap at the moment, so they wouldn't really be able to hit anything aside from japan and south Korea. Maybe Australia. Possibly a few rogue Denmark shots there just to keep things interesting. They sent the rocket almost into space, they didn't send a payload heavy enough to mean something up with the rocket...

The bigger threat comes from their uranium bomb stockpiles. they have a bunch of those probably given how much uranium they have, and they could load a bunch of them up on trucks and roll into the DMZ easily enough, or stick them in freighters and sail them into harbors, etc. The usual fun stuff.

While the US isn't exactly a secure bubble, we do have means of detecting radioactive materials. It's not foolproof, obviously, but the idea of loading nuclear bombs on pleasure craft and sailing them into harbors is unlikely to work. You'd need some kind of container with sufficient shielding to prevent detection. And that would have to go through third party ports, increasing the likelihood of being picked up. It's not quite as simple as it may seem at first.

It's far more likely that the saber rattling is designed to do two things:

1. Secure the new boy-king as a tough guy among his own people and leaders.

2. Scare people just enough that they'll give NK more aid money.

Let's not forget that the NK economy more or less exists solely because of foreign aid. China gives them money and materials to maintain them as a semi-puppet state. We (and other western nations) give them "humanitarian aid" under the idea that if we appear to be helping their people and providing them some basic subsistence, they'll be less likely to actually do something really really crazy. Oh. And we pay them to not build the nuclear weapons that they build anyway. So there's that too.

I definitely agree that the saber rattling is designed to do the first thing. And I wouldn't be surprised if it was also meant to do the second thing. But I think that he's NOT achieved the second aim, this time around. I'm a little hazy around NK current affairs but I THINK that the UN/NATO/ASEAN etc had decided food aid wasn't working to prevent any NKoreans from starving, and that there was a decision to wind it back, if not cut it off altogether. This might have been what prompted the pre-emptive nuclear strike threat from Kim Jung-un, but I think he's badly misjudged his tactic. Nuclear weapons are too deadly serious for any nation to just assume they've been put on the table as a bluff. And they are too deadly serious for any nation to allow themselves to be held hostage by them. I can't stress enough how significant it is that China has walked away from NK on this one.

Which is why I said "freighter" of which North Korea does own a few of, believe it or not. Also, they have access to lead and carbon, so shielding neutron radiation from an inert nuclear weapon the size of a small volkswagon is not exactly an impossiblity (especially in the bowels of a giant dense steel faraday cage with 3 feet cumulative steel sheet between the device and the sensors assuming they aren't borded). Not to mention the whole North Korea being surrounded halfway by water thing. They "let" a few dozen starving refugees "escape" on an old single hull freighter, wait for it to sail into the nearest frendly harbor, then boom! Everyone should be panicking about that possibility and ignoring air travel threats entirely at this point, but no one does.

Don't even need to be anywhere near a harbor really, lots of populated areas right next to land. Sneaking up on the US would be tricky, but sneaking into range of South Korea? Not difficult at all. Martime officials usually sleep sometime, and night inspections are rare unless they think you are already sneaking something. Would they ignore a north Korea flagged freighter? probably not, but what if it's flying a Japanese flag and has a fresh coat of the finest paint North Korea can buy? Doesn't ever need to exit north Korean control or even be at sea longer than a few hours to get from Pyongyang to somewhere "interesting" at night.

Most radiation detection equipment decreases in sensitivity logrithmically the further you are from the source. We can detect detonation from space easily, or from land anywhere on the planet when the neutron surge happens, but tracking an inert soft ball sized piece of plutonium inside a large lead and carbon box inside a steel cargo freighter at anything closer edit: further than a mile isn't happeneing. Too many potential background radiation sources.


Thats an easy one. Physical hardline from the bomb to an external antenna / cell phone. And if you can build the infrastructure to produce a functional nuclear weapon, you can probably figure out a simple remote relay switch. One would hope anyways.

North Korea probably wouldn't try that, and they probably wouldn't try it on us, but against South Korea, who knows. And North Korea is about as zany as they come these days. Who knew Kim Jungle was the stable sane one of the family???

Edited, Mar 12th 2013 11:30pm by Kaolian

Iran don't even have nukes yet.

As long as they aren't the same people we had on the ground in Iraq keeping tabs on the WMDs.