On the Morning of the Day They Did It

The BBQ Pit
1

That’s the title of a science fiction story written in the late 1950s/early 1960s. in the story, someone gets the bright idea that we should put nuclear weapons on orbiting platforms, so that we’ll be able to wipe out those godless Communists no matter what happens. Naturally, this turns out to be a mistake. The astronauts sent up with the nukes develop a case of [Ren] space madness [/Ren] and decide to launch their weapons, thus wiping out civilization. It looks like another lunatic has the bomb.

In short, to my eyes, it looks like we’re fucked. Bush thinks that he’s got some kind of mandate from heaven to smite the godless heathens in the Mid-East, he’s got our military tied up in a pointless fucking war, so that we can’t pull our forces loose if we need to, to go after this bastard.

I know what you’re thinking, “But Tuck, they’ve go no delivery system which can reach the US.” They don’t need to be able to reach us. All they have to do is hit South Korea, which should be no problem. South Korea has the largest and busiest shipyards in the world. Global trade depends on those shipyards turning out new ships like clockwork (and they do, taking something like 9 months to build a ship that takes the other yards over a year to do), then there’s all the electronics factories in South Korea. Damn near everything on the planet uses chips that come out of there, Kim “I’m so ronery” Il Jong decides to lob a nuke to the south and the global economy hits the toilet.

But, hey, SK’s got a military, right? So they can just roll north and fight the bastards, right? I’ll admit that I don’t know much about the SK military, but I do know that we’ve got one of the best trained and equipped militaries in the world, and we can’t spare the forces to go after NK, so if things start going badly for the South (as happened once before), if we’re going to do anything about it, we’re pretty much forced to respond with nukes. And we can thank not only the lunatic in the White House for putting us in this position, but also our “ally” Pakistan.

God damn it, if we go down, I hope we go down swinging, and imploding due to unmanageable Federal debt, and a drooling idiot President.

2

If it makes you feel any better, and I know I could use same this evening, Wikipedia sez:

3

What if they were planning on replicating the Davy Crockett? You know, something that can be fired out of an artillery weapon.

4

Please forgive my ignorance on such matters, but…

The fact that they can build an atomic bomb at all means that they have the know-how. So how is it comforting to know that they only blew up a little one? Why wouldn’t they use a tiny one to test their mechanisms and stuff, instead of blowing up a huge powerful one in a wasteful test?

5

That, my Canuck friend, is the plutonium laden question. IIRC, building a small nuke, is harder than building a larger one, so, if they intended to build a small one, and got exactly what they wanted, then that means they’re some slick bastards. If they built a big bomb, and only got a fizzle, well, that’s slightly better, since it means they’ve got to do a little refinement on their technique, but they’re still too close for my comfort.

Given that they don’t have a reliable delivery system for intercontinental ranges, I can well see them going for a smaller bomb, since they’d only need to plunk it down in Seoul, which is just a few spits away from the DMZ to cause real problems.

6

IIRC, I think you’re roughly correct. The difference in bombs is not the amount of raw materials used, but in the technology used to effect how the blast unfolds. So you could get the initial chain reaction right, (which is to say, the atomic part of “atom bomb”) and still end up with something that spews a whole lotta radiation everywhere, but doesn’t actually produce much in the way of an explosion. Which is why it would be so much easier to make a “dirty bomb” than a hydrogen bomb.

7

Little clarification: what it essentially breaks down to is this. The main thrust of the technology in your more basic atomic bomb is to get more of the core uranium in a bomb to fission. More fission, more blast. Also, the more fission you can get going, the less uranium you need. So technically, if you had enough uranium-235 you could cause a sizeable nuclear blast using, for instance, the bullet method (basically, smashing a smaller piece of plutonium into a larger piece of uranium and letting denature take it’s course. It really is just about as crude as it sounds.) However, with the proper technology (of which “fat man”, from “fat man and little boy”, was precursor) you can take that same hefty chunk of U-235 and make quite a few more bombs with a far greater blast to boot.

Then you’ve got more advanced methof methods that don’t use fission except as a trigger, letting fusion do most of the job (which uses the uranium even MORE efficiently), and those are the ones we think of as thermonuclear. Such as hydrogen bombs. Big badda boom.

Now that you know that, don’t you just feel so warm and safe inside?

“How may I be blown to bits? Let me count the ways; U-233, Pu-239, U-235…”

8

One more clarification: Methof is not a word that I’m aware of, nor was it intended to be one. Dunno how the hell that got there.

Also, in case I wasn’t clear on this before, I’m nowhere near being an expert on this issue, this all taken from shit I read years ago. So, y’know, don’t try to build a bomb using what I’ve said, or anything.

On second thought, just don’t try to build a bomb at all.

9

Let’s all take this moment to gain some emphatic insight.

North Korea is a country we know very little about. We don’t trust it’s leader, and its culture is alien to our own. And now it has nukes. How does that make us feel, us plain citizens? Scared? Angry? Well, that’s how most plain folks in other countries have been feeling when the current nuclear countries, United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France, People’s Republic of China, India & Pakistan got their nukes.

10

As Richard Rhodes, author of books on the history of the fission bomb and the hydrogen bomb, pointed out, every nation that tried to build an atomic bomb succeeded on the first attempt. The US was so certain of success with the “Uranium Gun” bomb “Little Boy” that they didn’t even test it, and it went off just fine. (It was the much more complex implosion bomb that was tested at Alamogordo).

It’s possible that the Koreans were seriously trying to build a small bomb the firsty time out of the gate, but my money is on them building a big bomb, trtying to incorporate some of the technology that lets you use less fissile material (thus extending your nuclear bomb capability), and not entirely succeeding. Thus, a low yield. You can call it a fizzle if you want, but I wouldn’t want one blowing up in my city.

11

Yes, but NK Hates Japan. Hates. They had a naval battle less than 10 years ago in which the NK’s ship was sunk, but the Japanese destroyer was so badly damaged it barely made port. With NK having the bomb, do you think that, maybe, Japan just might want the bomb now? They have a proud culture and have already rebuilt their military because of arrogant rantings by know-nothings in Washington complaining about ‘paying for their defense’. Well, now they’ll be going nuclear…literally.

And maybe SK too, as that pesky little DMZ has been preventing invasions from (but not tunnels from) the North for over 50 years. Hugo-A-Go-Go haired Kim still thinks that war is going strong, its just on ‘pause’. And Taiwan might just want nukes too, as they aren’t too popular with NK either, and with SK and Japan getting them, they’ll probably succeed.

Lets see: Taiwan, SK, and Japan rapidly all becoming nuke-states; the PRC are just going to love that. That means they’ll never get Taiwan back, which is totally unaceptable to them. Also, do you remember how happy the US was about missiles in Cuba…something about 3 minutes warning time? Well, that ‘warning time’ will be even less for the PRC…and they’re a tad paranoid now.

Yeah, this is going to end well. :dubious:

12

Building a physically small (small size/mass for easy delivery) bomb is difficult. Building a small (down to a few kilotons) yield isn’t, particularly – the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were about 13 and 21 kilotons, respectively.

13

There are some rather big differences between well, the rest of the world and NK. First of all, NK has been run for the past 50+ years by a father and son who are a pair of lunatics (though Kim’s dad was at least slightly saner than his spawn). Yeah, we’ve got our own lunatic running the US at the moment, but he’s still not quite as crazy as Kim. Next, the population of NK is suffering through a mass famine, and has been for a number of years. That puts the nation on some rather unstable footing, the natives get a little uppity, and Kim can lob a nuke across the DMZ and it’s chaos for everybody.

14

According to the BBC - Outcry at N Korea ‘nuclear test’, China are not happy with their ally, N. Korea, and Japan has said it will maintain its ban on nuclear weapons.

South Korea reports the blast at 550 tons but Russia has said it was between 5 and 15 kilotons.

The problem North Korea has now is that it relies on international help to feed its 23 M people.

15

This is the time for the PRC to show it’s willingness to play in the Big Leagues and take out Kim and the rest of the NK military structure before things get Really Ugly. The PRC could do it without breaking a sweat, and would up their global standing about 1000% in the process, with no down-side for them.

16

This makes a lot of sense. NK has kept artillery very well-entrenched and pointed towards SK, esp. the capitol Seoul, for nigh upon 60 years now. Developing a howitzer-sized nuke would fit well into that part of their military.

17

As has been noted in other threads, taking down the North Korean government could result in millions of underfed, improverished Korean refugees streaming into China. The Chinese certainly don’t want them.

18

You don’t think the Chinese can secure their border? They are about the last country that I would expect would have trouble doing so.

19

Count Blucher, I didn’t quite understand all the terms and abbreviations in your post, but if I understand you correctly, you’re afraid NK’s going nuclear might be the start of an armsrace in a proven recently unstable region. On this, I share your concern.

Tuckerfan, of course, if you ask me, I’ll agree with you that the Kim’s are a whole lot crazier then the Bushes. But my point is that plain Korean or Vietnamese or Indonesian or you name it Joe and Jane don’t necessarily share that point of view.
You and I know that the USA and the West are, in the end, run by reasonable people; and we are afraid that other countries’ governments are not reasonable people, and can not solve their regional conflicts. My point is that other countries all over the world probably have those very same fears of us. Their inhabitants are probably less educated and less well-informed then we are, but the emotions are the same. That and that only is my point. That this situation can give us some insight in how they have felt.

After all, it is the West (USA, UK, and a few other countries, including my own country the Netherlands) who have invaded another country (Afghanistan and Iraq). They’ve got a whole lot more reason to be afraid of us then we have to be afraid of them.

I believe, (and yes, I’m naive and always looking for reassurement) that none of the similar situations where a country got nukes have so far exploded. Originally, only the countries that developed nuclear arms themselves and their allies from WWII became nuclear powers. Counties big enough to do the research themselves followed, like India and China.
But ever since, it was never the "Dove"regions and countries that have armed themselves with nuclear weapons. It is always the “Hawk”-countries, the dictatorial ones, the paranoid, the ones with enemies, the ones with governments that need to convince everyone they’re powerful badasses. Like Cuba and Pakistan. North Korea is a logical next. So, nothing new under the sun.
I believe Hawks may be paranoid, but they’ve got a keen sense of self-preservation. That is why the nukes in Pakistan and on Cuba were never launched. The purpose of these weapons is the same as a gorilla thumping its chest; intimidation, gaining respect. No country has to gain anything by actually launching its weapons.

20

I need some ignorance fighting here.

Back in the 80’s I remember reading or hearing that a single nuclear weapon, detonated under water off the coast of the U.S. could cause a giant tidal wave and swamp the entire eastern or western seaboard. IS there any truth to this?