China, take care of your dog … or we will.
Governor Johnson: “What’s a warhead?” “What’s North Korea?”
Gov. Johnson, what should we do about the roach problem?
Gov. Johnson: “Problem? Well, everyone should own a roach or two.”
edited for grammar
Grammer smammer
Smoke um if ya got um!
Trump: Under my presidency, Asian continent will cease to exist. I will simply bomb the crap out of it. All terrorist and funny looking people will die. Our debt to China will be wiped out. We have Nuclear Weapons for a reason, let’s use them.
Donald Trump admits he is not prepared for this.
It would be funny if it were not the truth.
That is actually what he thinks.
God damn it! If they can set off a thermonuclear device underground why can’t they make a good barber in North Korea?
“Trump Praises North Korean Nuclear Test: Now this is what a strong leader looks like, folks. Although he could use a little help with the haircut.”
Was there any public response/announcement by the PRC?
I understand that if they lost 100k citizens it would not mean that much emotionally but the loss of face would be tremendous.
This is weird. Because now, according to the North Koreans, there is a window of some months/years when North Korea will have the ability to put nukes on long-range missiles but will not yet have done so. If that isn’t destablizing I don’t know what is.
Well, to be fair, 10-12 kilotons means they still haven’t actually set off a thermonuclear weapon and, indeed haven’t really even managed to detonate a fission bomb powerful enough to act as the initiator for a thermonuclear device . So it’s totally unrealistic to expect them to make up the Barber Gap any time soon when there’s still so much to do.
“It’s really great news,” said Rim Jong Su, 42. “Now, I am full of confidence that if the enemies make any little provocations we will make a counter attack and we will surely win.”
This makes me nostalgic for the days when it was only the North Koreans who said things that were so ludicrously nonsensical that they indicated that they don’t even know enough about what they’re talking about to bluster effectively and don’t know that they don’t know. Rather than, say, nominees of major political parties for the presidency of the United States.
Their yield data suggests to me that they’re still detonating “devices,” one-off, non-weaponized, undeliverable gadgets that, at best for them, are part of a directed experimental program, possibly a “learn by doing because we don’t have either the computing power or the database necessary to model” whose goal is to develop a deliverable and stockpilable weapon. It took the U.S. about three and a half years and a few tests after Trinity to get to that point (the result being the Mark IV nuclear bomb). I don’t think they’re even close yet.
And I can’t shake the feeling that, whether with the Supreme Leader’s knowledge or just de facto as a matter of self-preservation, there are two parallel programs. One produces components for devices that can be assembled that the physicists know for certain will produce a big enough boom to meet the Supreme Leader’s tantrum needs at any given time, such as when the U.S. is having a conference with Asian nations other than China. The other is a real experimental program where they are trying to figure out what they’re actually doing and I suspect that the latter is what produces the fizzles and low yields.
On the other hand, those may not be fizzles. Those may be them developing “suitcase” devices that can be smuggled into the U.S. because they don’t have a deliverable weapon.
Certainly they have to realize that none of the Golf class subs they bought from Russia are ever going to sea without picking up a Los Angeles or Virginia tail and if any of them ever gets within launch range of the U.S. it will, sadly, have an accident and will, tragically, be lost at sea with all hands.