We would prevail upon the Crown to send in its finest sex-crazed drunkard and his Playmate-esque female partner to take down Mr. [del]Blofeld[/del]Jong-Il and his fluffy white cat with his Walther PPK and a handful of curiously applicable gadgets supplied by a crusty technician. Of course.
Seriously, if Jong-Il tried this he’d be dead inside of a month. Diesel-electric subs are quiet when running on only electric motors, but they’re still detectable, and don’t have the range to go on long patrols. (Even this assumes that North Korea could invest the large amounts of effort and money into developing underwater SLBM launch capability, which they can’t.) Every nation with attack submarines would be combing the ocean, and while it’s a big place, it ain’t that big, especially when you don’t have a supply port to return to.
Stranger, I find it hard to see why Israel would attack Pakistan if it is attacked by Iran. It would be absolute suicide for Israel to do so. And stupid. If there is one thing that the last 62 years have shown is that Israel is not stupid (Bar Lev Line excepting). Iran might have a couple of nukes, Pakistan has several dozen it could dispatch to Israel, without even hurting its ability vis-via India.
MAD assumes an intercontinental ballistic missile or something similar with a return address. It also assumes sanity.
There are 2 scenarios that make retaliation difficult. One is a weapon that is brought in under the cover of darkness and detonated at ground level.
The other is a weapon launched as a high altitude EMP device that would render large sections of any continent severely crippled. All electrical infrastructure would cease and the ability to transport food would be severely compromised. Everything that relies on a computer chip would become a paperweight. 2 or 3 missiles launched this way would
create economic devastation on a scale that has no numbers.
It’s interesting to note that many of Iran’s missile tests involve launching them straight up off of barges which does not test the downrange success of a plotted trajectory. It’s like they don’t even care. Kind of like learning to fly a plane without caring about how to land.
Multiples of the cost of Katrina on a per square mile basis. More money than a world banking system could ever generate. It’s hard to put a number on it other than to say it is unobtainable. Think in terms of insurance. We pay premiums based on being able to cover a small portion of the population. If every object involved in commerce is damaged then there isn’t enough money to replace it all. It would be like rebuilding Mt Saint Helens. Some events are so large as to be impossible to repair.
I agree. Once North Korea launchs a nuclear weapon at anyone (Why Japan? The Republic of Korea is a more likely target) the world will demand retaliation. China is the closest country in a position to do so. They will declare the North Korean regime to have violated the peaceful spirit of international socialism and will send troops in to “correct” them. They’ll know that if they don’t act quickly, the South Koreans and Americans will invade and take over the North instead.
Hard to say because you can’t get a useful report on their tests from news agencies. Sea launched missiles from barges go back 10 yearsor more. It’s one of those tid-bits that sticks in the mind over time. Launching from a barge is not, by itself, that unusual but it demonstrates the obvious potential.
No expert on the subject but my guess is that North Korea would cease to exist, with or without nukes. Who gets the honors/blame? I dunno but it doesn’t matter…North Korea would no longer exist.
I blame Jericho and the Matrix. Popping a nuke in the upper atmosphere leaves a very clear return address; it didn’t suddenly appear in low orbit out of nowhere. The effects of EMP are also highly exaggerated, it’s not terribly hard to shield against the effects. Unprotected civilian infrastructure is vulnerable, but military and government infrastructure isn’t; having a functional chain of command to launch the retaliatory assured destruction after eating a nuclear surprise first strike has been a major consideration of MAD since the get-go.
If it’s launched from off shore it has no return address. In an asymmetric attack by terrorists who WANT to die the missile is launched and the boat destroyed. It could be launched from Cuban or Mexican waters.
No SCUD missile is going to reach low-earth orbit or any height large enough to create widespread EMP.
A SCUD launched from Cuban or Mexican waters toward the US poses no threat to the crew.
Anyway, you still haven’t pointed out even a suggestion of a cite that anybody is practicing launching missiles “straight up”, 9/11 style.
If you have a disposable crew and a disposable barge, why do you need an expensive missile? Just tow it to the southern tip of Manhattan and you’re done.
Not to doubt the danger of what Iran is doing, but your breathlessly contrived scenarios of suicide sea-launched SCUDS is not grounded in reality, and has no cites suggesting the same.
Regardless of the reasons for it, or who ends up as king of the slag pile, I daresay China would probably not be amused by nuclear firecrackers going off right on its doorstep.
Nobody would have any reason to interefere in a Pakistan-India nuclear war. They can blow each other up quite nicely, and would constitute an immediate military threat only to each other. and if a war went nuclear it would end quickly. The world’s other nuclear powers would likely sit back and start thinking about dealing with the horrifying aftermath - it’d be the worst human catastrophe in history.
I take a different view: India has sufficient population and area to be able to absorb a large number of nuclear strikes. With a population of well over 1 billion, the loss of even 100 million or so is simply not important in the longer term. For the same reason, a war between India and China could ‘safely’ go nuclear: both countries have the area and population to absorb the strikes.
First off you can park your “breathlessly contrived” adjectives in a no-sun zone. All I did was point out a scenario that would maximize a weapon and make it untraceable.
The Iranians are testing multi-stage rockets meant for low orbit ballistic use. They are testing them from barges. They are testing them in an unconventional way. When you combine that in a “what if” scenario you have an untraceable high altitude missile capable of an EMP nuclear strike launched off a ship that could be a pleasure yacht sailing anywhere in the world.
The scenario is made more understandable when you consider Iran has promoted the idea, and trained soldiers to carry out suicide missions. Saying this couldn’t be done is like saying 9/11 couldn’t happen. If anyone suggested it was possible to destroy the world trade center towers, bomb the Pentagon, attack the White House (failed) and ground every airplane in the United States it would have been soundly ignored. That is the reality of asymmetric warfare. We have spent billions of dollars on security measures and a suicide bomber walks right through security with red flags waving. The end result will be more money poured into the system and a couple of weeks of extra pat-downs at the airport. Meanwhile, the enemy invests the same amount of money which is usually in the form of donations from the very people who plan on committing suicide. The money spent by the terrorists for 9/11 consisted of box-cutter knives. Visa paid for the airline tickets, American Airlines paid for the aircraft and the dead passengers paid for the fuel. To summarize, an enemy bought a weapon that brought down a 100 story building for $3.
The other scenario I listed was even simpler. A nuclear weapon is driven up a river and docked next to any large city, maybe a couple of them. At the stroke of midnight the terrorists press a button marked “72 virgins” and the new year is rung in with an exceptionally loud bell. Their names are entered into the Guinness Book of World records under the category of “biggest fire works display”.
A new group called “God’s greatests hits” sends a tape to the BBC announcing their comeback tour. Where’s the nuclear return address?
First off, I think that any use of nuclear weapons will lead to very unpredictable consequences concerning retaliation. In the Israel example above in the thread, I can see the possibility of Israel not waiting to see which of its numerous enemies was responsible, and instead retaliating against all of them. Yes, that would be massively disproportional and unjust. Millions of innocents would die. It also provides the members of the “numerous enemies” set a lot of incentives to police their extremists. As Alessan noted above, Israel’s so small that one significant groundburst pretty much irradiates the whole country; what would Israel have to lose by portraying the image that it would massively retaliate against everyone?
The uncertainty about the global consequences is what I think is staying everyone’s hands. My fear is that a device is used and everyone finds out that the global consequences weren’t as bad as everyone’s fear of using them them was, and consequently nukes get used a lot more often. With that in mind, for the OP, I’d be completely against first use of any nuclear weapon system, regardless of how hard the target is. No target is worth putting the idea into people’s heads that nuclear weapons are just another type of bomb to be used.
With respect to the EMP question, my impression is that significant nationwide EMP production requires: detonation at or higher than LEO and either a multi-stage device or a large fission device optimized for producing high energy gamma rays. Lower detonation heights apparently lower both the max electrical field at ground zero, as well as the radius of the effect. Go see the Wiki for several neat charts, it’s a fascinating explanation of the topic. In any event, constructing a vehicle that can elevate an EMP warhead to the required altitude, as well as transporting the vehicle near the US, elevating it, and launching it, is challenging for even nation-states.
Further, I thought that, while Pakistan and Iran both are rumored to have nuclear weapons, that those weapons were exclusively fission weapons, perhaps with tritium boosting and levitated cores, but that they were not likely to be building multistage devices any time soon. Despite testimony from Dr. Lowell Wood that significant EMP can be had from small (1kT) devices, I doubt that either Pakistan or Iran have optimized their fission devices to produce EMP; the research would have to be from scratch. No multi-stage or gamma-optimized devices means a much lower EMP effect. As others have stated, it’s still not going to cripple the US military. Much. And I’m sure that sort of EMP attack it would be treated as use of a nuclear weapon against the US, with resulting invasion, regime change, swinging at the end of a rope, etc…
Regarding your final point concerning the lack of a nuclear return address, my impression of current radiochemistry is that it is indeed possible from device residues to determine the location where the device’s Pu-239 or U-235-enriched uranium was generated. While I don’t know if the state of the art permits statements like Tom Clancy’s “Savannah River. K Reactor. 1968. It was a very good year,” my understanding is that the reactor that originated the materials can be guessed at with pretty high accuracy. At least, known ex-Soviet, Chinese, or Western reactors could be eliminated from possibility.
On the other hand, I totally agree with your statement about seaborne delivery of a WMD. Absent some very trick monitoring system, I don’t see how you stop it.
Interesting quote from your cite:
Another possibility might involve an adversary with a long-range but relatively inaccurate ballistic missile or a short-range missile launched from a platform that engenders some inaccuracy itself, such as a ship or a submarine, and have only a relatively low-yield nuclear weapon. In this case, the weapon could be more confidently used for an EMP attack than a direct attack, because the accuracy would not be required for the EMP attack.
Also, it appears fission weapons may be more powerful as EMP’s than thermonuclear devices because the 2 stage process has a canceling effect:
** Note in graphic three that the thermonuclear weapon consists of two stages, a primary stage, which is typically of relatively low yield and is used to drive the secondary stage, which produces a relatively large yield. Each weapons stage produces its own EMP signal, but the primary stage gamma rays, after they go out, leave behind an ionized atmosphere from their EMP generation that is present when the secondary stage gamma rays arrive a moment later. Thus, the primary stage can degrade the EMP associated with the secondary stage.**
Clancy is an execrable writer, but he does tend to be thorough in his research, even if some of the information comes from biased sources. In the case of determining the the reactor and fuel lot from residue, he is spot on; each reactor has a characteristic variation of product isotope ratios, and each production run will have a unique set of byproduct ratios. In the case of plutonium processing, because of the non-trivial occurrence of production of the poisonous [sup]240[/sup]Pu production during neutron capture (and subsequent daughter products), the material has to be progressively processed to strip out the [sup]239[/sup]Pu before too much [sup]240[/sup] is produced the material has to be constantly refined. This production cycle leaves a characteristic ratio of other products that I suspect would be nearly impossible to reproduce.
If those ratios are known, the sample can be determined by GM/CS analysis. Even if access to the original products aren’t available, a catalogue is maintained of all products released in atmospheric testing. I suppose you could attempt to distort the sampling by deliberately including additional daughter products, but I doubt you could do so to such finesse as to replicate another reactor.