Japan considering strike against North Korea

Japan attacks North Korea? It can only mean one thing: Giant. Motherfucking. Robots.

Oh yeah.

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Actually, I thought that was the case for quite some time, but apparently the North Korean artillery would have serious trouble doing a lot of damage. The first reason is that Seoul is huge. It'll take more than a few artillery shells to make some real damage. Second is that the North Korean artillery hasn't been fired for real in quite some time, meaning it's likely they'll need a few tries before being able to hit seoul correctly, the first few shots are likely to miss by a large margin, and hit some less densely populated areas of the city if they hit the city at all. Last of all, artillery pieces would have time to fire only a few shots before the North Koreans would have to bring them back in their mountain tunnels as ROK airforce, US airforce and whoever else decides to join the party will essentially control the sky and will be able to blow up anything not fortified in a matter of minutes after North Korea starts lobbing shells at Seoul.

It's a fairly safe guess to say that the South Korean and the US already know where those artillery sites are located, and likely even have plans ready should they ever need to destroy them. Hell, the US has plans to invade Canada, they probably have some in case of war in a place that has been dangerous for the last 50 years. Give the US/ROK 1 hour, and I'm plenty sure there won't be much artillery left firing at Seoul.

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Yeah, according to Wikipedia, North Korea has 46 ships. You can expect anything that's not underwater to be pretty quickly should war errupt. As for what already is underwater, it essentially consists of glorified U-Boats and state-of-the-art Soviet engineering. Well, it was state-of-the-art, back in 1950.

Frankly, the most potent anti-ship weapon North Korea has is probably something like the Silkworm missiles they manufacture. Thing is, those things are already fairly low-tech and inaccurate, so against ships with modern equipment designed to counter missiles, they're pretty much useless. Any hit would likely be due to pure luck and nothing else.

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Beside, there's the matter of how they'd use their bombs. A large bomb deliverable by bomber is useless to NK since their bombers would get blown into pieces the moment they cross the DMZ. And I don't think they'd have those bombs anyway, for technical reasons. In Iran's case, having such a bomb is much more probable, and it's true that their bombers have a higher survival chance than those of NK since the countries around Iran don't have the same kind of technology as the ROK and won't necessarily shoot on sight anything that comes from Iran. Still, where would they use an a-bomb? Their bombers don't have infinite range. And then everyone would be on their asses.

As for warheads deliverable through missiles, that's a bit more of a problem. In Iran's case, I doubt there ever was a gun-type device built small enough to fit on a missile before, which is much more likely to be used than an implosion device as they have uranium and not plutonium. Gun-type devices are much, much simpler than implosion devices, but no one usually bothers with them for other reasons, so I'm not sure if the reason a small one has never been built is because there's some technical challenges or simply because no one ever saw the use. I'd tend towards the second option myself, meaning Iran could get a bomb on a missile, likely something like their Shahab-5 or -6.

As for NK and nuclear missiles, I've already pretty much gave my opinion in another thread. They know full well that a weapon deliverable by bomber will be useless, as I've said above. More likely than not, from the start of their nuclear program they've worked toward a design small enough to fit on a missile. Whether they have a working one or not right now, there's no way to know, but it would essentially be a matter of time before they do as they already have plutonium. Assuming they did have a bomb, then they'd still have to choose a missile. That's more or less of an issue if they want to hit South Korea. Anything in their arsenal can have a warhead near 1000kg, and the range isn't an issue. Any of their SCUD improvements will do. Or they could use a Nodong or a Taep'o-dong 1 if they wanted to hit Tokyo.

Of course I don't think it's necessary to say that launching a nuclear missile will result in the sky raining fire over North Korea. That aside, before they could actually launch their missile they'd have to make at least one test to make sure their warhead works as it should, and since no crater has appeared in NK lately, we should be fine. That's not the case for Iran though, since a gun-type device is much simpler and much more likely to work.

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