Not a HAPPY development, but it’s not exactly an existential threat to the United States. 50 years of Mutually Assured Destruction went with the sun rising every morning, and I suspect MAD-without-the-M-part will go similarly.
I worry quite a lot more about Pakistani devices.
I’m sure glad essential positions within the State Department are filled with knowledgeable experts! Oh, and surely we have a terrific ambassador in Seoul…
@erik_t Pakistan’s development of smaller, “tactical” nukes should terrify us.
Until they successfully test one, I’m not buying that they have perfected the technology for equipping an ICBM with one.
Must be that time of the week.
When Mueller drops a bomb, KimJong-Un wants to launch one.
Well, this didn’t work:
Let dead-eyed Stephen Miller give it a try. As NASA found out, Pence’s eyes don’t seem to work any more.
I think it’s safe to assume Donald believes the H stands for Huge and will see if he can inspect a Huger bomb so he can tweet his win.
I don’t think loading an H-Bomb onto an ICBM would be particularly difficult or earth shattering news. Now if it were a functional H-Bomb loaded onto an ICBM that could survive launch and reach its target, that would be problematic. Regardless, it may be time to loose the powers of what Michael Cohen claimed to be the “best negotiator in the history of this world” and put an immediate end to any pending threat.
Ratch it up. They keep poking at Trump.
Trump:
- Talk is cheap. I want action
and/or
- Obama’s Fault.
and/or
- Made up by Fake Media. Everything is going great. North Korea is running scared.
and/or
- China is just not doing its job to placate NK.
KCNA said Sunday that leader Kim Jong-un inspected the loading of an “H-bomb into the ICBM.”
Chiselin’ Trump: “Big deal! I’m ready to unleash some F-bombs in my next tweet!”
Sorry. It’s bullshit. No one would put an untested warhead onto the country’s tiny stock of missiles and they have not tested anything in the thermonuclear yield range. Once they do, it still takes years, and more tests, to get from a test apparatus to a weaponized bomb small enough to cram into an ICBM reentey vehicle. Especially a small, liquid fueled one like theirs. Oh, and speaking of recently vehicles, they don’t seem to have one yet.
Then there’s the part where we’re not really sure but what their talk of a “hydrogen bomb” isn’t a translation error–a reference to what is, in fact, a tritium boosted fission bomb (a thing that would make sense because it is a way to make a fission bomb smaller).
They’re on the road. They’ve made great strides in recent years. There is nothing anyone in the world can do to stop them at this point. The people who actually know what they’re talking about say they have the range to hit New York and D.C. with something (though likely not the guidance or reentry vehicles and possibly not the payload). And a 30 or 40 kiloton fission warhead would be quite enough to fuck up whatever and whoever is beneath it when it goes off quite thoroughly. But they do not have any thermonuclear warheads on ICBM’s. Just credulous, ignorant journalistic hysteria.
Somebody needs to sit donnie and kim down and explain to them that the way
batshit crazy tyrants have ALWAYS tried to take over the world is to try and do it together…
I mean … that’s just standard protocol … the way it’s been done in the past …
And that’s the way it’s done in the movies ----
They are never going to get anywhere if they can’t be friends —
ANd the earth is flat and there’s a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
I wouldn’t argue for equivalent situations or threats here. During all of the Cold War, we had robust diplomatic relations with the Soviets, we had cultural exchanges, we had summit mertings, we had American businesses setting up shop in the USSR. We conceded Eastern Europe to them. And most importantly, we had the mutual memory of the wartime allance that brought down Nazi Germany, where the toll on the Russian people was so great that no Russian leader wanted another war, let alone a nuclear war with the US.
We have none of this with North Korea. What we have is an assumption that the North Korean leader “knows” that any attack on the US would rain destruction on North Korea that matched Trump’s most reckless and improvident threats and boasts. But we really don’t actually “know” much.
With all these uncertainties, we can never let the North Koreans strike first, with the millions of Americans killed, leaving part of our country a raioactive wasteland. So, while we would tolerate a North Korean nuclear capability (and are doing so now) and ICBM, I don’t think any American president would/could tolerate a loaded, nuclear tipped ICBM on a North Korean launch pad. I think an American first strike would be inevitable, to take out that missle before launch-- with all the unquantifiable actions afterwards.
There are a lot of things we can do, diplomatically and otherwise, before we get to that perilous point. Our problem is that we have a president frozen in the ice of his own dangerous ignrance.
Can’t we just buy their nukes? Or possibly trade them for James Franco & Seth Rogen?
That’s the point. It isn’t clear that any of their tests were fully successful. And even the last, most powerful one was in the range of 20 to 30 kilotons. The one that was allegedly a hydrogen bomb yielded even less. Now granted, we have warheads that can yield in that range. But we can also put that warhead within meters of a target. And we also can dial up those warheads to a much more powerful yield.
I suppose it is possible that they are concentrating on extremely tiny weapons. But the US and the USSR spent billions each to get to that point and it is hard to believe that the Norks were able to do the same with a tiny fraction of the resources.
As others have noted, Pakistan is of much greater concern. Their development was greatly aided by the Chinese. So they have some relatively small, tritium boosted weapons that are quite capable.
At this stage? It’s ridiculous and yeah, impossible.
Here is the United States’ first thermonuclear “bomb,” the Ivy Mike “item.” 1952.
Here is the first* weaponized “dry” hydrogen bomb fielded by the U.S. in 1955, the Mark 17 thermonuclear bomb.
Here is the W-38 warhead, first deployed in 1961, one of two or three similarly sized thermonuclear ICBM warhead we began deploying starting around 1958.
And it’s not just about size. Weight is crucial.
And, finally, here is a helpful chart comparing their size to the most “modern” warheads in the inventory, all of which were built in the 70’s and 80’s.
https://in.boell.org/sites/default/files/images/pics/Nuclear_weapon_size_chart_284px.jpg
Now, granted, they’re not quite inventing the infernal things from scratch the way we did. There’s a lot of loose information about warhead design floating around that could jump start them, though it’s rife with deliberately obscured and outright false information. And you can grab a cheap laptop today that has the power of the “supercomputers” they were using to design the currently deployed generation. But we also had the luxury of being able to do dozens, hundreds of test explosions to generate data without using up significant fractions of the nation’s fissile material (at least, by the 50’s) or generating the kind of backlash North Korea gets from a single fizzle.
As I recall, they still always get defeated by batman…
North Korea reminds me of Captain Carnage in The Watchmen.
Will Trump be Rorschach?
