Do you really want to detonate a nuclear device 120 miles from your capital city (distance from Seoul to Pyongyang)?
Nuclear artillery shells require some very high end nuclear and engineering tech.
They will get a “transportable” regular nuclear weapon way before they get those.
Wouldn’t bother ME that much. Though, depending on how the winds blew I might lay off gardening and wallowing in the dirt for awhile.
Heck, maybe North Korea has gone capitalistic and desires to increase local tourism.
Link safe for work.
http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/atomic-tests-were-a-tourist-draw-in-1950s-las-vegas/375802/
If any nation uses nuclear weapons against us or any of our allies, that nation is going to be obliterated quickly and thoroughly. I don’t think there’s any disagreement about that. But quickly and thoroughly obliterating North Korea would not require use of nuclear weapons on our part. We can do the job just fine with conventional weapons.
The only two reasons we haven’t already are that, first, China would very much not appreciate the decrease in stability of the region, and second, that if we did, North Korea would retaliate with their very real and capable artillery aimed at Seoul. But neither of those restrictions would be in place in this situation: If the North Korean leadership actually goes so batshit that they’re willing to pull the trigger, then our intervention would represent an increase in stability, not a decrease, and we’re assuming that the North is already firing everything they’ve got, so there’s no deterrence value there any more (in fact, the more artillery placements we can take out quickly, the less the damage they can inflict).
Let’s assume the following scenario. North Korea use a nuke somewhere somehow on the south.
Now it is obviously war. We are pretty sure once “we” fight back, all that artillery WILL be use on the south.
I can imagine a scenario where using low yield nukes to take out that artillery as fast as possible results in less deaths than not using nukes.
Though the irrational fear of nukes could well mean the more deadly but non nuke version is still used.
Note I said imagine, not stating a fact here.
And I have little doubt such numbers and scenarios have been examined and calculated and pondered a gazillion times over by the important folks that might have to make the call.
Short ranged counter-artillery and a squadron of A-10’s we keep over there.
I know.
The devil is in the detailed calculations.
The point about delivery platforms is important. And it underlines the institutionalised insanity that is the NK regime. Delivering a nuke onto Seoul isn’t the point of the ICBM or nuke capability. Delivering one onto Tokyo or other very major target is. Why? Because appearing to be insane, with a very major destructive capability, buys an uneasy respect. One that can be parlayed into concessions of tangible value.
Whether the NK regime is quite as insane as they are trying to portray themselves as is another question. They do have the appearance of something of self-fulfilling echo chamber of madness. But remember, they have made an art of this over some decades. The comic-book level of current appearances is, to at least some extent, deliberate. The danger is that it does represent a somewhat out of control regime, one with internal divisions and power plays for survival. That can become destabilising enough that the insanity becomes all too real.
NK has backed itself into an extreme corner of the strategic playing field. The usual rules and expectations on how they act don’t apply. And this is going to be true for any action taken in response to their actions. One thing one tends not to do is punish an oppressed populace for the actions of an insane dictator. Nuking NK in retaliation would be a war crime in and of itself.
Something not yet mentioned …
Folks are assuming the US & SK will always choose a non-nuke response. I agree in general and said so above. And as **Francis Vaughan **just said, simply making reprisal attacks against NK population centers is stupid, counterproductive, and perhaps a war crime.
But …
Kim launches a nuke at Seoul and it works. That proves he has that much capability whereas before there’s been guesswork & innuendo.
How certain are we now that he lacks the capability to hit Tokyo, Honolulu, or San Francisco? Dependng on how much capability we thought heahad the day before, we may be very surprised, or not surprised at all. And therefore maybe suddenly not confident at all that NK can’t hit more distant targets.
If so, deciding to launch a conventional attack / invasion that will take a couple weeks to a couple months to unseat the regime is running the risk that when Kim’s back is to the wall he might fire on Tokyo or San Fran.
Recall that Korea is really bad terrain for modern mechanized fighting. And for much of the year tactical air is heavily hampered by truly craptacular weather. Sunny flat tank-friendly and F-16 friendly Iraq it is not. That NK is doomed from their first overt act is unquestionable. The timetable won’t be nearly as certain.
There will be a lot of pressure for a nuclear decapitation to pre-empt NK’s remaining nuke capability. One thing NK has zero of is strategic warning systems for incoming ICBM/SLBM. And not much effective counter air detection or attack capability against cruise missiles.
The idea of us nuking their launch facility(ies) and top 2 or 3 HQ bunkers with relatively precise mid-yield weapons would be on the table from moment one. And with rapid reaction being the primary driver for which systems get chosen to implement the attack. There are SLBMs somewhere in the Pacific that probably just need to receive the message “Attack plan R ASAP.” After that it goes pretty quickly.
I suspect too that the current posturing has very little to do with confronting the west or SK, and a lot to do with generating a crisis atmosphere to smoke out uncooperative elements in their own government. There’s been plenty of talk about this or that high official being shot (or fed to the dogs), which usually means different factions are struggling for control.
The government makes threatening noises, or does something apparently stupid like shelling a SK island or sinking one of their military boats, when they are trying to disrupt factional conspiracies or movements inside the government. There’s no point in attempting a takeover and having half the army fighting the other half when the enemy might be coming over the hill any second.
Even paranoids have enemies. We have this mistaken belief that everyone bows down to the Kim du jour. In fact, all these totalitarian regimes, from Idi Amin or Saddam to the Kremlin or China, are balancing acts where people are constantly jockeying for position or making connections and looking for an opportunity to make themselves the power in the land. A skillful leader uses various tactics to ensure they don’t get taken down - divide and conquer your opponents, don’t let them get too familiar with each other, control and split command of the military so no one person has the direct command of all the forces, and of course fear and spying and disappearances in the night. Trusted assistants are not fed to the dogs because they didn’t laugh at the dear leader’s jokes - they end up curbed because it appears (possibly on flimsy evidence) that they are trying to organize a cabal of various officials with the goal of effecting a palace coup.
Good point LSLguy.
If the call is made to glass parts of NK, the longest thing will be the amount of time it takes to transmit the orders to the subs via ELF.
But launch facilities and bunkers are relatively small targets, and even mid-yield nuclear weapons are designed to devastate large areas. We needn’t send in ground forces to deliver launch-facility sized bombs. You can put a conventional warhead on an ICBM and take out a launch facility without annihilating the country, but we don’t even need ICBMs; we have much smaller missiles with simpler guidance systems parked in South Korea.
The only “ticking time bomb” scenario I can see nukes being on the table for is if we don’t know where the launch facilities are, or we don’t trust that we know where they are, so we’re willing to carpet-nuke the whole country just to make sure we get 'em all. But I have a hard time believing that we don’t have all of the coordinates for potential launch facilities loaded up into precision guided missiles on the SK border at all times.
eta: Even carpet-nuking the place isn’t really a guarantee that we’d hit any unknown missile silos; they’re underground for a reason.
With conventional bombs you can be sorta sure you took out the target. But if it is hardened that’s not really a sure thing.
With a well aimed, even small nuke, you are a buttload more sure you took it out.
You wllling to risk Tokoyo being nuked to avoid some middle of nowhere crap hole getting nuked?
As I said in my edit, I don’t think you’re really a “buttload more sure” that you took it out even if you throw lots of kilotons at it. A miss is a miss. It’s infinitely more important to have good intel than to have big bombs if you’re trying to destroy hardened underground targets. An air-burst nuke might destroy a city, but it’s going to have relatively little affect on anything underground. The closer to the ground it detonates, the smaller the footprint of destruction.
Well, which IS it? They destroy big areas or do they destroy little areas?
If they are going after hardened ground targets, or even not hardened ground targets, they are going to detonate that nuke down low, probably as low they can.
And for that matter, hardened or not small ground targets have been a major target of US nukes from almost day one. Our goal was generally to nuke the other guys nukes, not turn their cities into glass.
Was it? Seems population centers were high up on the list. The targets in that link were prior to ICBMs but I’m pretty sure turning cities into glass was always the idea. The whole point of nukes and MAD is that you can’t destroy the other guys’ arsenal before he launches, so you need to make him not launch in the first place.
Of course, those were strategic nukes. I don’t think we ever had tactical nukes strapped to ICBMs, so we wouldn’t have had any way to deliver small-yield “precision” warheads in the event of global thermonuclear war.
Population density of Tokyo. About 5,000 residents per square kilometer.
Population density of North Korea. About 200. Rural areas…let’s say a 50 maybe. Areas RIGHT around important things like their nuclear facilities, bases, and rocket launching areas? Probably a fraction of that.
So, a low end nuke on Tokyo is going going to kill somewhere between a 100 and 1000 times as many innocent Japanese as it is North Koreans.
So, if some general tells me “sir, we think there is a fair chance they have another nuke and working missile…and well, we are pretty sure convention bombs will take em out but we are even more sure some tactical nukes will do the job”.
Well, I’m pressing that button.
I’m not sure they have the power to obstruct anything in the UN. As noted above, the UN is currently at war with North Korea and has been since 1950, and the Security Council authorization of force that was approved when China’s seat was still held by Taipei remains in effect - no need to pass a new resolution when the existing one already authorizes action, and China wouldn’t be able to pass a new resolution de-authorizing force.
“We consider the public statements (by North Korea) threatening its adversaries with ‘pre-emptive nuclear strikes’ to be completely unacceptable,” the ministry said in a statement.
“Pyongyang must realise that in doing so, North Korea is definitively turning its back on the international community and creating a legal basis for the use of military force against it,” the ministry said.
https://news.yahoo.com/russia-calls-north-korea-strike-threats-totally-unacceptable-155615402.html