The situation is essentially the same as the medieval kingdoms of Europe or Asia, but with more interesting weapons. The heir is the ruler because stability is the paramount force of inertia keeping government going. Some follow the current ruler because they see advantage in being in his inner circle. Some are less secure, and consider there may be alternatives. The clever ruler keeps aware of who may be an alternative - and so a threat. They then neutralize these threats with various means, vicious or simply clever. Don’t allow disgruntled leaders to congregate where the can conspire is the simplest. keep the crisis pot boiling so there’s no idle time in which to make plans, and no stability so plans cannot be fixed.
This is what I’ve read about is the key to the frequent “crises” with NK. The Kim of the day (thanks) is churning the forces at his disposal so they can’t collude and get together for any serious coup attempts.
How much of this is Kim knowing what he’s doing, how much is the people content to hide behind the throne and let him be a figurehead - that’s the question isn’t it? Same in any country…
But the short answer to OP is - they’ve learned by watching Saddam, and Gaddafi and others that - have no nukes, easily invaded. Nukes - no invasion. So as long as they dance around like crazies and let off the occasional test nuke or test missile, they are much more immune from invasion. And that’s all they want.
The constant war-like footing, as I said, also means they can keep the population cowed and working hard without having to open up to the outside and so risk people seeing the truth behind the curtain of government.
Ground bursts result in more and nastier fallout, which lasts longer and affects a larger area for a longer period of time.
Yes, the air burst does more immediate damage to lightweight (civilian) above ground structures, but after a few months there is relatively little lingering radiation which is why both of those cities could be rapidly rebuilt.
I guess it’s a trade-off between short and long term effects.
The tiny problem with an airburst is that about half the yield is wasted upward into the sky. A ground burst does not really solve this. However, if you build a thermonuclear weapon with a healthy can of D/T fuel but limit the yield by omitting the Pu/U boost jacket (cf. Tsar Bomba), you get what is called a “neutron bomb”. Neutrons only live for 21 seconds before turning into protons, but in that short time, they are fuck-all bastards that penetrate just about everything. If a lot of death is what you want, that strategy can be quite effective, even in a ground burst.
It was. A thermonuclear (H-) bomb consists of a fissile “sparkplug” bomb, a “holraum” containing the D-T fusion fuel, and a fissile jacket that catches the heavy neutron flux from the fusion reaction to turn those neutrons into additional nuclear energy. Tsar Bomba was estimated to have a 100Mt yield in that configuration, but the Soviets were a tad uneasy about setting off a device that powerful even over remote Novaya Zemlya, so they left off the jacket, which, AIUI, halved the yield. Any fusion bomb without the jacket is essentially a neutron bomb: still quite the blast, no matter what you read in Dead-Eye Dick, just a bit less force than a typical H-Bomb.
But then, the ground burst from the first test (Trinity) did not that I recall have serious adverse effects downwind - fallout was not that bad. Yet, it was set off on a tower only a bit above ground. The problem with fallout is two-fold; how powerful the bomb is (IIRC, neutrons will then turn all sorts of nearby material radioactive) and what sort of debris it can loft into the air.
The clincher in Failsafe/Strangelove was a bomb surrounded by cobalt that the radiation would turn into the radioactive isotope, then vaporize it into a long-distance cloud following the prevailing winds.
We have no idea what sort of toys North Korea is playing with, how big, what configuration, but I’m sure their physicists are not stupid and I suspect someone has read books, or at least watched western movies, enough to grasp what their options could be - surgical strike, dirty bomb, EMP. Half the point of MAD is not saying what their side of the MAD consists of. Even if they only destroyed say one or two cities, or rendered only 3 or 4 states uninhabitable, that’s probably a chance Washington is not eager to gamble about.
I thought the idea was to kill tank crews through the tank armor, yet be able to send your troops in later without fear of radiation poisoning. Why so large?
You know, there’s other options. North Korea, if they can build a nuke small enough to fit on a missile, can just :
a. Buy a few large sailboats, cash, somewhere in Hong Kong or elsewhere.
b. Load the nuke by having the sailboat rendezvous with a submarine somewhere in the ocean. The nuke can’t be more than a ton or 2, and it can’t be too large.
c. Sail the boat to LA harbor. Send another one to the Washington coastline. Send another to San Diego harbor.
If the nuke is disguised as a marine diesel engine or something, it could be quite simple to legitimately just unload it in the marina and truck it to a point where detonation will do maximum damage. Of course, there’s a deadman’s switch and anti tamper switches and so on, so if the authorities question the boat’s registration or the crew or anything, worst case scenario they can just set it off.
No, contrary to popular belief, radiation detectors will not sense much if anything. Plutonium is just an alpha emitter, and while some types of nukes have neutron sources inside them, there’s a lot of heavy metal shielding it.
I frankly think the odds of any country pulling this off to about 90%. There’s not really any security mechanism to stop it.
The Patriot missiles probably never brought down a single Scud. Most of the Scuds were so hopeless they simply fell apart in mid-air, sometimes in roughly the vicinity of a Patriot.
In another thread it was observed that this level of reliability is what makes NK’s position extraordinarily dangerous - to them. It is all well and good to be perceived as slightly crazy and possessing nukes, but for them to ever actually try to use this ability is deeply fraught. A large number of their launches fail. A clear attempt to launch a real strike will also probably fail, but leave them essentially without viable protection or threat.
The rule of a stand off is that the threat only works so long as you don’t use it. Nuke doubly so.
The threat of smuggling a nuke into the US or other country is of no value. It is an aggressive act, but one that can only work in their favour if the threat is revealed. Smuggle it in, and then announce to the world that there is a nuke there. This won’t work very well. There is very little wiggle room that does not leave a large fraction of NK as a sheet of glass.
Detection of nuclear material doesn’t just rely upon radiation detectors looking for the background signature of decay from the fissile material. Things like gamma activated spectroscopy can directly see it, and will also identify a large lead package. Minimally just about every shipping container coming into a country will be scanned.
Tsar Bomba was not specifically designed to be a neutron bomb. It was designed to be a big badda boom – sort of a proof of concept. The Soviets wanted less boom (like, to be able to tell the air crew that it might not be a suicide mission), so they pulled the jacket, which essentially turned it into one. A designed high-neutron-yield bomb will have a modified jacket that readily passes or amplifies neutron output.
People learn from their failures. North Koreans are people. I would not be so confident in the enduring incompetence of their weapons program.
No, but experience elsewhere has shown that it takes massive resources and time to learn. You can’t learn just by navel contemplation. You need opportunity to make many many mistakes, and that needs both time and resource that NK almost certainly doesn’t possess. Their lack of ability may not be enduring, but it is likely to be lengthy. It provides a window in which to sort the problem out. They have waded into this half baked. That isn’t smart.
This is absolutely not true, and a glaringly ignorant statement. Yes, there are advanced scanners that can detect actual nuclear weapons, but none are in use, anywhere in the world.
Yeah, true. I’m rather immersed in the technology, and whist the stuff I had read about was 12 years ago, it seems that little has happened in terms of deployment since then - which rather surprises me. At least in terms of gamma activation. Gamma imaging is real, and it will see a lead box and probably raise the alarm enough for someone to want to check the container. But detection of fissile material via activation by either neutrons or gamma photons seems to have not been taken up, even though I thought that by now it would have been. It isn’t cheap, and may simply be judged as not worth it.
Thanks for acknowledging that. Yes, the problem is harder than it sounds. There are now passive radiation detectors at all major ports, but these are basically just automated geiger counters with a shield so they only are set off by the cargo containers underneath.
What you are talking about is bombarding the cargo container with an active beam of gamma rays, hunting for fissionables. You would need a small building worth of equipment, mostly shielding. It would be abundantly obvious this scan was being done. I’ve heard of more exotic methods but as far as I know, they all require rooms full of expensive gear.
Problems :
a. Since it is totally obvious which containers are checked for nukes, the bad guys merely must pick a route that doesn’t go through the scanners.
b. If the bad guys can get a megaton class device, they can just set it off in the port at the scanning station and do plenty of damage.
c. This is extremely expensive, and it doesn’t really protect from a number of threats. Again, lighter, more modern warheads could probably just be paddled ashore in a rowboat or using an air boat from a yacht offshore, nearly invisible to radar. With a simple hoist, it could then be loaded into a van or Ryder rent a truck and driven to anywhere. Meanwhile, it slows international trade to a crawl.
From the newspapers over the years, I’ve gleaned that some US sea ports and some of the main overland entry points for containers do have some sort of scanning facilities. Which looks at some containers, not all, for some stuff of interest. Which stuff apparently includes what they hope are signatures for smuggled bombs.
After that vague statement, further details don’t seem to exist. I do know that TSA/CBP are constantly asking for a bigger budget to deploy more sea port security. Which requests are repeatedly denied by Congress. Due it seems, to some combo of baseline Congressional hostility to spending of all kinds and transport industry hostility to anything slowing throughput or taking up valuable port space.
Smuggled dirty bombs. A dirty bomb is just a cobalt 60 rod or something duct taped to a stack of explosives. It will be emitting enormous amounts of gamma rays, and if the bad guys were lazy about shielding, will be trivial to detect.
A nuclear device is primarily U-235 or Plutonium. Plutonium’s an alpha emitter, U-235 has such a long half life it rarely emits a gamma ray. Now, apparently there’s more in there than just that. Polonium, etc. Those could be detected if the mass of the bomb’s core (which is itself amazingly good radiation shielding) isn’t in the way.
I think a modern manufactured nuke made by a government would be undetectable. There are exotic active methods where it’s possible to detect properties specific to fissionable materials themselves - like gamma spectroscopy - but this is not something you can covertly scan every cargo container with.
Searching about I found this presentation from about 2007, which is close to what I remembered. The answer seems to be that although there were high hopes back then, the entire thing has gone cold. There are large scale gamma scanners built for use in scanning containers, and they are not exactly small devices, nor cheap, but these are in use. But much beyond has stalled. Actual active spectroscopy, whist possible would need multi-million dollar facilities, and the scan rate probably simply not worth it. The linked presentation seems to suggest a lot of overselling and the GAO got involved, after which the money dried up.
I think the intention was never to covertly scan containers, but the problem then is that you need to overtly scan every container. And that is beyond viable for many reasons.
Thanks, eschereal.