North Korea wants to be an attention whore again...

North Korea obtaining nuclear weapons would not instantly make it more dangerous than it is right now. The main reason North Korea is the pain in the ass it is today is because they have Seoul within range of their artillery, and perhaps to a lesser extent, they have Japan within range of their ballistic missiles. What they can actually do to the South Korean capital if war errupt is somewhat debatable. The complete annihilation scenario which is often mentioned is improbable, if not impossible, but that doesn't mean they couldn't inflict quite a bit of damage and substantial civilian casualties. It really depends on whether or not the South Koreans and their allies can find and strike at their artillery position fast enough; before the North Koreans retreat in their mountain tunnels. This is the main reason North Korea is that dangerous.

Their army isn't the biggest threat, even with a million men. If North Korea was invaded, then they could certainly be quite deadly seeing as North Korea is mostly mountains, and because the North Koreans have been fed propaganda about how the US eats babies is about to invade for the last 50 years. But if North Korea is invading, then things aren't the same. For one, logistics would be a challenge. There are but a few roads through the DMZ through which convoys could pass. And since North Korea has absolutely no chance in hell of ever having anything close to air superiority, any convoys crossing the DMZ would likely be turned into burning wreckage by US and South Korean planes. Those roads would literally be blocked by wreckage. Logistics aside, North Korean propaganda keeps telling Koreans they have the highest standards of living on the planet. Chances are that should the North Koreans reach downtown Seoul, it wouldn't be long for a lot of their soldiers to figure out it ain't exactly true. That is assuming that their army even has enough morale to even get there without breaking apart at the first encounter with other troops.

Now, what would North Korea getting nukes accomplish? First, it depends on what their scientists and engineers have been able to piece together. If they successfully built a warhead small enough to fit on their ballistic missiles, then, and only then will North Korea be more dangerous than it was, especially for Japan. But that's more difficult than simply building a nuclear bomb of any size, even if NK has to use an implosion device to begin with (they only have access to plutonium, thus ruling out the simpler gun-type bomb). I don't think it's impossible, in fact it's likely they've geared their program toward production of "compact" nuclear weapons since its inception. But let's be realistic here, using nuclear weapons would be suicide for North Korea. They could reach either South Korea or Japan (the US is still out of range as we've seen during their last missile test), but in either case that means the end of Kim's regime.

If all they have is a bomb too large to use as warhead on their missiles, then in North Korea's hands, it's a large paperweight. Any bomber coming from North Korea and entering either South Korean or Japanese airspace will be shot down without asking questions. The worst scenario would be them selling a few bombs on the open market to the highest bidder. While they've exported a lot of SCUDs and other similar weapons in the past, they'll probably be much more reluctant to sell something they can't manufacture as easily as short-range missiles.

Long story short, North Korea wouldn't become much more dangerous offensively.

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Originally Posted by Duo Maxwell

Kim wants a prosperous North Korea, that won't happen if he continues his father's doctrine of self-reliance. He has even been quoted, on one of his diplomatic visits to China, praising the Chinese economic advancements-- due to their adaptation of a market-economy in the 80's. Sure, it's not going to happen overnight, but I'd say a revisitation of something similar to Agreed Framework would most likely accomplish our immediate goal of disarmament along the DPRK/ROK border and provide the DPRK with a valuable resource.

I really have doubts about that. Kim is pretty much one of the most secretive leader there is and it's fairly difficult to see what he really wants. I think that first and foremost, he wants to keep his grip on power. Seeing how he's been essentially sacrificing millions of his own people through starvation or concentration camps (easily on par with that of Nazi Germany, minus the systematic mass murder and with more forced labor), without any apparent attempt to even rebuild the agricultural capacity of his country which would be fairly essential for any kind of economic growth, I'd say he doesn't care much about a prosperous North Korea. It might be somewhere on his list of priorities, mind you, but it's fairly low compared to staying in power and preventing any outside interference, which essentially involves spending insane amounts of resources on his military.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Erm, a single US missile sub (and I bet there's already at least one in the area), has more than enough in term of warheads to lay waste to everything that's worth blowing up with nuclear weapons in North Korea. Partly because there isn't much to blow up, partly because a single Ohio class SSBN carries 24 fucking Trident II missiles, each of which can carry up to 8 W88 warheads, for a grand total of roughly 90 megatons of sweet, sweet thermonuclear doom.

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Originally Posted by Night Phoenix

The only logical solution now is to wipe out North Korea's military capability with a crippling first strike.

I mean, isn't that what "You can either have a nuke or a future" means?

No, see, that's diplomatic talk for "Please don't do that or we'll be angry". I really doubt much will happen unless North Korea suddently decides they want to start firing artillery shells at Seoul or something equally stupid. I mean, detonating a bomb like that, assuming it really did work and didn't fizzle, is stupid, but only borderline suicidal. It'll probably take more for any military operation against North Korea to take place.

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Awww, they did not even talk about the concentration camp where they test chemical and biological weapons on prisoners, usually whole families. Or how the prisoners are sometime tied to the back of a jeep or truck and dragged around the camps until they're dead. I'm disappointed.

Seriously, Kim is as bad as Stalin or Hitler, the main difference being that the latter mainly killed jews, and the former probably wasn't as brutal as that when it comes to what took place in his gulags.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by The Wise Vivi

Hmmm... I must have been thinking of Star Wars New Rebellion (Novel), where they used a Neuron bomb. Kills all the people by destroying their heads but leaves the buildings and infrastructure undamaged. I hear the Americans are researching a bomb such as that....

Yeah, those are nuclear bombs. You're using nuclear disintegration to generate a large number of lethal particles/radiation (most notably neutrons) in order to kill people while having a minimum effect on infrastructure. The "nuclear" in "nuclear bomb" doesn't refer to the mushroom cloud and stuff exploding, it refers to the energy souce of the bomb.

As for actual neutron bombs, there have been research projects in the past for creating such a weapon in all sizes from something capable of cleansing an entire city to something small enough to be deployed as a tactical weapon. But most if not all of them have been cancelled due to technical difficulties and the fact that they'd likely be more or less useful as tactical weapons in today's wars, and because thermonuclear weapons pretty much do the jobs the larger versions would do. You rarely want to kill everyone in a city while leaving the infrastructure.

All that aside, I haven't seen any definitive confirmation yet that the explosion in North Korea was nuclear, and that the bomb did not fizzle. The actual yield has varied widely in term of estimates, and even the highest estimates make the bomb seem really small for a first attempt. Since North Korea only has relatively basic nuclear technology, it's safe to assume that their bomb used a "simple" spherical core and implosion design, which limits how low the yield can actually be made. At this point it's possible that their bomb fizzled out, or perhaps even that they've faked the whole thing with a shitload of conventional explosives. Coming from North Korea, I wouldn't be surprised.

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That, as well as counterfeiting of US currency, among others. And they're essentially the main exporter of crappy ballistic missiles for third world countries. Whether or not they decide to start selling bombs likely depends on the rate at which they can produce them, which in turn likely depends on the rate at which they can extract plutonium and, to a lesser degree, build the explosive lenses assembly.

I wonder what their policy for returns/refunds is if their bombs fizzle?

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Originally Posted by Bradylama

Who's to say they aren't using the gun method? The projected yield so far seems to indicate it.

That's a possibility, which I have to say I had not considered. I do have doubts, however, on whether or not such a things is possible, and if so, whether or not the resulting weapon would be any more useful, read powerful, than a bundle of WW2 potato mashers held together with duct tape.

Ok, so first, you cannot hope to make a gun-type device with plutonium that will be able to qualify as a real nuke. Without going into too much details, this is because when Pu-239 is created in nuclear reactors, you also create a whole lot of other stuff in smaller quantities. One of these is another isotope of plutonium, which I can never seem to remember, either Pu-235 or Pu-240 (most likely the latter, the former seems awfully low in neutrons for its size). Anyhow, this isotope decays somewhat rapidly, emitting lots of neutrons, which happen to be what is used to fissionate nuclear fuels.

A gun-type device creates a super-critical mass just like an implosion device, but it does so under much less pressure. This means that the masses of fissile material will have a much easier time to separate before a substantial quantity of the mass is transformed into energy. With plutonium, the contaminant that creates neutrons insures that your mass will become slightly super-critical before the masses really touch. By the time the mass of fissile material has a criticality constant which is relatively high above 1, there's been enough energy created to repel the mass but not to create a substantial explosion.

The question is, just how much energy can you get out of such an awful and useless design. Frankly, I don't know. I could probably make some really rough estimations, but I'd rather study for my midterm tomorrow than make calculations all evening. But a "normal" design might not even have the energy that test had. Packing a shitload of explosives in order to give more energy to your plutonium "bullet" won't allow you to scale up your bomb much as you're more likely to destroy you bullet than anything else. If you were to build a really large device and used timed charges along the "barrel" to accelerate your projectile further, you might be able to get something slightly better, but certainly not worth the additional complexity.

But this is North Korea we're talking about, so they might have designed a normal gun-type bomb with plutonium, knowing it'll fizzle. I'm not sure why, though. If it's the case, when other countries figure out, and they will, they won't care about Kim anymore, and Kim will likely have lost foreign aid, with various sanctions added. Since kim doesn't seem like a class A imbecile, I'd say he knows that, and that makes it unlikely.

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Actually, and technically speaking, I believe they are still at war with the US and the ROK, as the only thing signed back in the fifties was a cease fire, not a peace treaty.

Out of the restrictions set on the DPRK by the recently passed UN resolution, it wouldn't surprise me if the ban on the import of luxury good will be the most damaging. I mean, I suppose that Kim has enough cognac and mercedes for a decade, but then again I believe he is one of the largest customer for some of the largest distillers of high end liquor in the world, so he might go through his reserve in no time.

The problem comes with maintaining the lifestyle of high-ranking party officials and generals. These guys are actually incredibly rich when compared to the average korean, obviously, but some of them are fairly rich when compared to individuals from the west, and certainly lead a lifestyle that would make a number of millionaires blush. The chances of North Korea having, or developing, an industry producing luxury goods to support this elite is, how shall we say, slim, if we consider that they can't even feed their own people, so without the import of luxury goods from the outside, those guys might get fairly unhappy with Kim. And Kim might be the Dear Leader, but he still needs the support of the military, at the very least.

Of course it all depends on how strongly the resolution is enforced. But if it's enforced well enough, I can see this bringing down or at least weakening the North Korean regime much more easily, and with less civilian deaths, than pretty much anything else.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Hmm, if that article is indeed correct, it seems that the DPRK isn't nearly as stable as I thought. I mean, I knew that Kim had to flex his military muscle to stay in power, but I did not think there had been coup attempts and riots in Pyongyang, essentially the city with the best quality of life in North Korea and inhabited only by those considered loyal to the party. Since those revolts seem to have been started by the North Korean elite, it wouldn't be all that unlikely that a significant portion of the army would be reluctant to fight or would just plain surrender if other countries were to invade. Unlike the average North Korean, those people know what happens in the outside world, and they know that they'd get blown into pieces sooner or later.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

You lie, you bourgeois bloodsucker! The DPRK is a socialist paradise. You can see so yourself just by reading news from the KCNA. Just go to NK News (easier to search than the KCNA website). I recommend the Hall of Fame, you'll find some true gems in there. There's even one where the KCNA practices "investigative journalism" to find out who is responsible for the few shortcomings of the north korean government. Who said they were just a propaganda tool?

The suggested searches are also good for a few laughs, especially that bargraph for the word "birthday".

Of course, the very style in which these articles are written will tell you more than the content about how well north korea understands the rest of the world, or at the very least, the english language. Let's just say that the KCNA has a very... unusual writing style.

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