The calculus behind the figures of tens to hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilian deaths, relies on the assumption that all of the North Korean tube artillery and rocket batteries are able to continuously fire over a given period. While the ultimate effects of persistent chemical agents on a modern military are debated and unknown, one thing nearly everybody agrees will happen is that the operational tempo will slow down. Everything is harder to do, and takes longer, when wearing chemical agent protective clothing. So, rates of fire for all of those artillery and rocket batteries will go down, the total number of shells per hour hitting the northern Seoul suburbs will decrease, and fewer Seoul civilians will die. This assumes their chemical warfare gear even works, and their gunners are able to operate in a MOPP-4 mandatory environment.
As to the question in the OP, I do not believe the US will use nuclear weapons to retalliate against North Korea in the even of a nuclear weapons use, either as an EMP weapon or as a low altitude explosion, against South Korea or Japan. The Mutual Defense Treaty between the US and South Korea does not mention nuclear weapons at all. In the event of any attack, all the U.S. is obligated to do is, at Article 3,
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Others in the thread have already pointed out that the U.S. does not need nuclear weapons to remove the current ruling regime in North Korea. Indeed, the U.S. does not even have tactical nuclear weapons to use for its forces in South Korea. Which is not to say there aren’t a lot of other ways to immediately deliver nuclear weapons to the DMZ and points north. Including South Korea developing an indigenous method for doing so.
I’m not surprised that’s the Russian’s attitude. I am surprised they chose to voice it in public that clearly. Makes one wonder whether the Russians have any confidence their ambassador in Pyongyang can even get an audience with anyone who can be trusted to get word to Lil Kim.
We need to remember that “nuke” <> “strategic nuke”.
The most worrisome weapon the North has is not its crude, low-yield nukes - it is the 13,000 heavy artillery along the DMZ.
I think it rather certain that both the ROK and the US have worked out plans to neutralize those guns.
I would not be surprised to learn that those plans involve small-medium nukes* - they DO take out people very, very well, and those guns need people to load them.
And a medium sized one on a cruise missile into the tunnels used to test the NK nukes would be a good idea.
What I’d like to see is the PRC’s plans to take down its “good friend” across the river.
These days, I’m suspecting they might be regretting getting involved. Consolations prize: the DPRK has a mountain of rare earth metals.
at one point at least, the US had nukes in artillery shells
Yeah. If the Lil Kim uses a nuke I hope he targets somewhere in China. They are a major player in the making of this mess.
And if this whole thing isn’t a classic example of letting a small problem turn into a big problem because nobody wanted to deal with the fallout (heh) of dealing with the small problem I don’t know what is.
If you read reporters like Richard Rhodes or Eric Schlosser’s accounts of the early SIOP, you can be excused for thinking the U.S. had a “Nuke all the things,” attitude towards the Soviet Union. IIRC, Moscow had something like 95 devices targeted on it, delivered by something like a dozen bombers and half a dozen missiles.
Anyway, classically, countervalue strategy was the point of the early submarine borne ICBM force, mainly because Polaris, Poseidon, and Trident I lacked the accuracy and yield to reliably destroy hardened ICBM silos and command centers. (Though if anybody’s managed to put the GE Missile Effectiveness and CEP Calculator online, you can double check those numbers for yourself.) Trident IIchanged that. So too would’ve the BGM-109A Tomahawk TLAM-A (I’ve also seen it written as TLAM/N), with an 80 m CEP and a 200 kT warhead, if you had the luxury of waiting the 4-5 hours of flight time a TLAM took to get to its target, and if you didn’t mind the odd one crashing on friendly territory.
With things like GPS and laser guidance, everything got more accurate. Further, with things like a ground penetrating nuclear warhead, and “dial-a-yield”, it’s quite possible from the mid 1980s on, to have very precise, very small yield nuclear weapons for bunker destruction, that may yield little fallout. Utilizing something like a rocket accelerated GBU 28 with a heavy fusion fraction, small (.1 to 1 kT) nuclear payload, I can easily envision such a device detonating far enough underground so that little fallout reaches the surface, while simultaneously collapsing whatever giant bunker system it’s aimed at.
All that said, as I wrote in the previous post, I don’t see it happening with a nuclear detonation on or over Japanese or South Korean soil
Unfortunately his missiles have the ability to reach California. (or so he says)
I like to think that, in the event he targets California, the retaliation would be similar, swift and devastating to his military infrastructure.
I don’t think that we, in the West, understand just how incredibly devastating any nuclear attack would be on a mainland US city. Oh, sure. NK would be occupied. But those details will be of miniscule importance compared to the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.
First of all, I know that I may be off base here. But I think the damage done by a modern H-Bomb (even one as small as 10 Megatons) is beyond the imagination of most of us.
Modern day H-Bombs are often reported as being equivalent to 20 Megatons of TNT. I’m going to discuss one that is only half that big - just to try and put things in perspective.
The above link reports that the Hiroshima bomb was equiv to 15,000 tons of TNT. Compare 10,000,000 tons to 15,000 tons.
10,000,000 is 666 times larger than 15,000. Let’s call it 700 times larger. It’s lethal radius was 1.3 km or (0.8 miles). Let’s round it to a one mile radius.
I don’t think it would be accurate to say that if the small bomb caused devastation within a radius of one mile, the larger one would cause devastation within a radius of 700 miles. I don’t think it works that way. But I’d guess the area of total devastation would be much, much larger than just one mile radius. I’d guess it would be at least 20 miles radius (just a guess based on videos of modern tests of H bombs). But that’s not the essential fact.
If a modern H Bomb was exploded in a large US mainland city, let’s try to imagine the aftermath. First off, I would guess there are not enough doctors in the entire Western hemisphere to treat the injured. That city’s transportation system would be completely destroyed and even if the entire nation set about to repair it, the damage could not be repaired for years and years.
The economic system would be essentially destroyed. All banks and other financial institutions would be gone. All their records would be gone. I’m guessing that modern large financial institutions do not have plans to recover from a nuclear attack. Why would they? The people in charge of those institutions would realize they would be dead and their friends and families would all be dead. What would be the point in them trying to prepare today for something in the future if they will all be dead?
I’m still just guessing. But I think that even if it were possible to recover from the effects, it would take years and years to recover.
But the US would not likely get the opportunity to try and recover. Some other country would very likely try to step in and take over. If the US were lying helpless after such an attack, any rival country would not be filled with compassion and come in to help. They would be filled with greed and the desire to take advantage of a big opportunity and they would come in and try and seize all of American’s valuable assets and territory.
OK. I’m still just guessing. But I think most people imagine the aftermath of a nuclear attack would be similar to the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. But there is just no way. That is a big mistake that nations always make. They believe the next war will be similar to the last war. They believe the next big disaster will unfold like the last big disaster. But it just doesn’t happen that way.
No. Instead of think a nuclear attack with a modern H Bomb would be like a serious body blow, I think the truth is that it would be much closer to a fatal death blow and there would be almost no chance of any kind of recovery. I’m sorry to be so pessimistic. But I’m just trying to look into the future and see an honest picture of the future. I’m very sorry.
Why am I posting this? Well, I think if there is any chance for the US to avoid this future, they need to form some kind of coalition NOW and go into NK and occupy the country **NOW **and destroy all their nuclear bombs **NOW **and do whatever is necessary to secure the planet from any more nuclear explosions. I don’t see any other way for our long term survival. Someone else has made this point in another thread about NK and I think they are correct. I can’t see any alternative.
By the way, I am not a physicist and I have no real knowledge of atomic bombs or their effects.
That’s why I made it so clear that I was just guessing.
I hope that some of you who actually know about such things will give us an accurate explanation about just how damaging a modern atomic bomb is and just what would be the likely effects of such an explosion.
I’d especially like to know what you think the true “kill radius” would be.
Oh, and also the effects of radiation. I completely forgot to say anything about radiation.
Charlie, not that this’ll make you likely feel any better, but you can get a good enough idea about casualties from a nuclear explosion in a city from something like Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP. Nifty little combination of Gladstone with Google Maps.
Anyway, very large megaton devices were pretty much an artifact of the early Cold War. Not because later weapons designers and nuclear war planners became more humane, but because large devices such as Tsar Bomba, or the 10-20 megaton devices you mention, are inefficient. It turns out you can kill a lot more people and break a lot more things by diffying up the fission and fusable material in one giant bomb, among several much smaller devices.
Accordingly, the largest device in service, off the top of my head, is the 4-5 Mt warhead atop the Chinese DF-5. Wiki for the R-36/SS-18 Russian ICBM indicates that the DF-5 and the 5 Mt variant of the UR-100N/SS-19 Russian ICBM, are the largest warheads currently operational. The Soviets used to deploy a 25-ish Mt warhead for one of the SS-18 variants, and the U.S. used to have an air-dropped 25 Mt weapon, but both of those are out of service. You simply don’t need something that big anymore to kill anything, even a bunker like Cheyenne Mountain, or whatever the Russians have beneath Yamantau. Accuracy helps a lot with that sort of thing.
I agree with your main point though that a nuclear device detonating within a modern city, even a 1-15 kiloton device expected to be within the North Korean’s current technical capabilities, would be a catastrophe beyond most comprehension, with secondary economic and cultural effects I couldn’t begin to foresee.
All this talk about North Korea potentially striking the USA with a nuclear bomb needs a sanity check. The only NK missile that could reach the U.S. western mainland is Taepodong-1 which was only flown once, in 1998, and may no longer be in service. Taepodong-2 has been used recently for launching satellites, but has a shorter range (could conceivably hit western Alaska, meh) and again, most likely hasn’t even been deployed for military use. There’s also grave doubts about their accuracy, or if NK could build a nuke small enough to fit on an ICBM.
What could happen is a nuke strike on Japan, if their short-range missiles are capable enough (Japan’s densely populated so if they target Tokyo and miss, they could still inflict incomprehensible damage) and all they really need to nuke Seoul is a big-ass catapult. And their conventional artillery trained on South Korea is an established threat.
Here’s a NUKEMAP I just came up with for a 10kT bomb in Times Square, with wind blowing to the NW. Total prompt casualties are in the quarter of a million dead range. Add another 1/3 of a million injuries. I don’t think the app properly models fallout, but add about another, what, 50 percent again of those figures for fallout injuries? Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren’t good comps, IMHO, because those were airbursts; this thing’ll be a lot dirtier.
I don’t think there are enough doctors to treat all of the injured for something like this. The economic costs were modeled by Reichmuth BA, SM Short, TW Wood, FC Rutz, and DS Schwartz in a 2005 working paper, Economic Consequences of a Rad/Nuc Attack: Cleanup Standards Significantly Affect Cost that, annoyingly, is not available online. These guys, who seem well biased on the anti-nuclear side, so take their assessment accordingly, claim the paper listed the costs of a cleanup from a 100 kT detonation in NYC at 10 trillion USD.
It’s going to be a giant mess. Not society-ending, or an extinction event for the inhabitants of a country or state—other than maybe the perpetrators—but it’ll be the largest tragedy in U.S. history.
EDIT: Who said anything about a missile? Warhead to NK submarine (that we don’t have as good a handle on as we would like, unfortunately). Submarine to isolated port where the warhead can be unloaded, eventually placed on a jet transport aircraft, and flown to a third country with poor cargo import/export controls. Fly from said country direct to NYC. What stops that? And if we can stop that, why can’t we stop similar planes/ships/whatever filled with narcotics?
Then you should go back to the link I posted which allows you to pick the site and the size of the nuclear weapon (with about 20 useful examples including the last 3 NK tests) and see what happens.
Even if a nuke went off in, say, Seattle, 99% of the United States would still be intact. Catastrophic economic damage? You bet. But technically intact.
I don’t believe that NK has the ability to mount a nuc on a rocket. And their rockets are unreliable at best. As are their nuc’s.
But there is plenty to worry about. Un is ~32 years old. In ten years or so, they may have ICBM capability. Maybe more, maybe less. The ICBM doesn’t necessarily need to be accurate. Good enough would be plenty. If un stays around that long, he just might say fuck it, and launch.
The good news is that the longer their 50 year old military tech sits, the less reliable it will be. Their current artillery that threatens Seoul will slowly move from obsolete, to scrap.
It’s worth noting that the South Korean government has steadily been shifting it’s administrative functions out of Seoul to Sejong City about 150km south. Partly to help negate the ongoing threat of the NK forces across the DMZ (a delegation from SK visited my workplace about 12 years ago when they were looking at planning for a new alternative capital city).
They’re scaleable, with dial-in yield settings. You’ve got dinky (?) tactical warheads, and massive multi-megaton monsters. We have the ability to suit the yield to the purpose and need.
For comparison purposes, the diagram in that link suggests a Hiroshima-sized bomb will cause total destruction in a radius of one mile, down to light damage to a radius of three and a half miles.
Your estimate of the damage is similar to my guess. I think it’s very sad but also likely very true.
"I don’t think there are enough doctors to treat all of the injured for something like this." Unfortunately, also very true.
May I ask you, what is your opinion of the destructive nature of a modern bomb when detonated at ground level versus at some level above the city.
Would such a bomb cause much greater damage if it was placed in someone’s basement and detonated? Or in a building on some floor high above the ground floor?
Would there be a significant difference in the damage if it were detonated indoors vs. out of doors?