North Korea may test hydrogen bomb in Pacific Ocean

a reply to: silo13

Who will give the order if we bomb a parade with a tactical yield nuke?

originally posted by: face23785
a reply to: NuclearDamocles

The other thing people bring up is their guidance system, but ya know what they say, almost only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear weapons.

One of the bombs we dropped on Japan was off target by like a half-mile as I recall, still decimated the city. And NK's bombs are more powerful.

Exactly. I've got a link for the likely Circular Error Probable on NK nukes somewhere, if I find it I'll post it. Let's run a numbers game real quick.

Upper end for the arsenal is 60. Now assuming the U.S. is # hot we destroy 30 of them. The North only has a 33 percent success rate per missile that remains that it will get from pad/TEL to target. The North wants to insure they go down swinging so instead of 2 they assign 3 per target.

Even assuming only 33 percent success with their remaining operational force you are looking at upwards of 10 denotations with potential yields up to 500 kt the upper limit for boosted weapons.

That's not a good day for East Asia.

a reply to: NuclearDamocles

My next question would be how many of those missiles have they produced and how many launchers do they have?

a reply to: face23785 Hundreds depending on the type.
Today the situation is still controlable. North Korea doesnt have operational long range ballistic missiles and their ICBM capability is based soley on liqued fuel types. Liquid fuel means they acutally have to fuel those missiles before firing, you cant just deploy them somewhere ready to fire. And once you fueled them you'd better use them or you new to refurbish them before they are launchable again.
In a crisis situation the US would quickly detect launch preperations and swiftly take out the launching facilitys.

Unfortunately this will change in the coming years. North Korea is already testing solid fuel missiles with intermediate and even worse, they are building mobile launchers as well. Give it a decade and the US will face the same dire situation they faced during the Cold War when the USSR disloacted parts of their arsenal on mobile launchers in Siberian Woods. Back then they had the nuclear armed B-2/QUARTZ combo to deal with it and it will be very, very difficult to counter a North Korean mobile MRBM/IRBM force armed with hydrogen warheads.

This is an excellent 5 part article series that goes into a fairly detailed look at various parts of the possible conflict by the Stratfor website.

Link

The various parts are:

Part 1: Assessing the North Korean Hazard

Part 2: Derailing a Nuclear Program by Force

Part 3: What the U.S. Would Use to Strike North Korea

Part 4: How North Korea Would Retaliate

Part 5: The Cost of Intervention

The site is behind a pay wall after you've viewed several articles, but that limit exceeds ten articles a month if I remember correctly.

I believe I may have posted this elsewhere in another NK thread or two, but I really think it's worth a look if you're interested in the situation beyond the normal MSM take of a paragraph or two.