I’m not asking about the political or international repercussions – all good questions suitable for IMHO or GD – but about what would physically happen.
According to this morning’s newspaper, the last test by North Korea indicates they could hit LA or Chicago. I believe they have nuclear capability. So suppose they hit LA with their strongest nuclear weapon – what happens? How many dead from the impact? How many (assuming typical weather patterns) dead from fallout? How much of Southern California will be a wasteland, and for how long?
I’m old enough to have participated in “duck and cover” exercises, but that was a long time ago and much has changed since then.
okay, I suggest a likely response will be that the US Commander-In-Chief a retaliatory nuclear missile is dropped on Pyongyang.
According to Nukemap this leads to several million dead. Pyongyang is about half a degree latitude different to Sacramento, California, but 9,000 km to the west.
Even assuming that that ended the active hostilities right then and there, where does the wind blow? Which fellow opponents of the North Korean regime will be taking the long-term effects of any blast?
If North Korea starts a full-scale thermo-nuclear war with the United States, dropping ICBMs on multiple American cities and military bases, we’re going to bring in our “big gun”: Dennis Rodman. We’ll send Dennis to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to meet with Kim Jong Un and tell him unequivically, “little dude, if you launch any more missles our way, I’m not going to be your friend any more!” Case closed.
According to the nukemap, if a 45 KT weapon (probably within the NK ability to build and deliver) were detonated over my son’s apartment on the North Side of Chicago, we could expect 85,380 dead and 281,200 injured immediately. The heat blast would cause third-degree burns at a radius of 1.9 miles.
A surface blast would result in fewer immediate deaths and injuries, but blow a fairly impressive plume of fallout across Lake Michigan.
A plausibly-sized nuke dropped by NK into a US city or its suburbs will make a large mess.
The number of killed and wounded will be about what we lost in Viet Nam. But all at once and all in one general location instead of spread over a decade plus and distributed all across the country. So 20 years later it’ll have been a non-event to the population headcount at large. But in the immediate aftermath it’ll seem to have been a very big deal indeed.
A tremendous amount of that city will be destroyed or damaged. OTOH, if it lands in downtown LA, only about 5% of the greater LA megalopolis will be even a little bit damaged. The other 95% will be wondering what that loud noise was. 20 years later it’ll be full of new construction and be a thriving metropolis again, just as Nagasaki & Hiroshima are today and were in 1965 20 years after their attacks.
Fallout will cause mass panic downwind for 1000 miles. And almost no detectable actual effects. A few more cancers 5, 10, and 20 years later, but no way to connect any single case specifically to the attack.
If the American people choose to be brave, this will be a major annoyance to the country at large but no more than that. If the American people choose to be scared children, we will implode ourselves both economically and culturally. Thereby handing victory, however Pyrrhic after our inevitable retaliation, to the NKs.
Our only two real-world samples of an airburst in the 20KT range over inhabited urban areas, are today …inhabited urban areas. As **LSLGuy **said, were back up and running within a few years. So an airburst in the under-50 KT range of yield would be unlikely to create a lasting “wasteland in Southern California” though there would be one hell of a cleanup/rebuild necessary, and health effects on those exposed at the time and in the near aftermath would stick around for a lifetime.
Surface burst, as noted, *would *create fallout and more explosion product contamination. Many vessels that survived the surface-level Operation Crossroads Baker test at Bikini ended up too contaminated to be repairable, in a groundburst that would be a possible fate for structures and equipment that survive the flash & blast close in, greatly complicating cleanup and rebuild.
For casualties if aiming at a place like LA there would have to be also the question of where it hits. If there’s a surface hit on the port at Long Beach, casualties will be by far lower than an airburst above downtown, but the strategic damage will be worse.
If NK actually scores a nuclear hit on a US target, any known major NK command centers and nuke facilities will just have to be glassed that same morning on principle. Inevitably, it doesn’t stop at that and SK gets creamed in the process as verse three sees the remaining operating and loyal units of NK emptying whatever they’ve got onto SK.
From what I gather on the web, ground level winds in Korea are mostly southerly in Spring and Summer, mostly northerly in Fall and Winter, and high altitude winds are prevailing westerly to southwesterly most of the year. South K wil have bigger things to worry about but Japan, China and Russia will not like it anyway, and depending on the weather systems that day/week the Governor of Alaska may have something to say too.
Just sayin’, one possibility is that a few hundred square yards of urban or suburban environment get cratered by an inert warhead. What I mean is, I don’t think North Korea has successfully demonstrated detonation of a missile-launched weapon.
Yeah, but in the real world, they won’t launch ONE, they would launch a salvo, perhaps a couple of dozens. Even if half of them hit, you are looking at USSR WW2 levels of destruction, only in a few hours instead of over four years. The kliling (many times over) of every North Korean man, women, child and family pet won’t balance the scales. Which is probably what the Kim’s are counting on.
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North Korea has A-bombs. In 2015 they claimed to have H-bombs, but the rest of the world has been pretty skeptical of that claim.
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The rest of the world has usually been skeptical of North Korean claims.Typically followed shortly by North Korea doing what people were skeptical of. Nukes, ICBM,s etc. Maybe its time to start taking them seriously?
It is very unlikely NK as any sort of launch on demand capability. And similarly very unlikely they have the ability to launch more than one at a time. For now. How reliable their launch systems are, and whether they have a weapon small enough to place atop a launcher are unknown. But reliability seems mediocre, and making small nukes is not trivial.
But in terms of the nuclear game, NK are close to the problem that most nations worried about with proliferation. They make a solid attempt at being seen as insane, and thus not amenable to talking sense.
They will understand that the chances of the country’s leadership surviving if they did launch a strike is very low. But they are playing brinkmanship. They believe that unless they are seen as a credible threat their country will eventually fall.
Where it becomes difficult to control is where the country’s leadership believes that face an immediate danger. Sadly, that danger is more likely to be from within that without. If the incumbent dictator feels threatened by the military, and is unable to purge enough from the ranks to re-instil the fear he needs, he may escalate things for internal benefit. He may do this because he perceives that his life is in danger from internal tensions.
If a nuke was launched, the only credible thing to do is to keep back the majority of the countries missiles, and try to avoid a retaliatory attack by making bigger threats.This is where MAD breaks down. MAD only works if the first strike is large. A single missile that has probably much less than a 50% chance of a successful nuclear strike is not enough for a nation (the US, or any other nuclear power) to turn into a sheet of glass. Worse, the Chinese would be very unhappy. MAD related retaliation on a rogue state, rather than a superpower doesn’t fit the game plans, and thus things remain unstable.
So, nuclear strike from NK on the US? Best guess is that it will never happen. If it does, single strike. Most likely outcome is it fails to hit its target or otherwise fails. You may get a very small nuclear detonation, or just a spray of nuclear material where it impacts. Very small chance you get what is described above, successful airburst over downtown LA. Smart money would be on it dropping into the Pacific ocean. This poor reliability and the impossibility of covering up the intent of the launch is the big downside for NK. For them the most likely outcome is a failed strike attempt. After they did so attempt, they have basically wrecked every element of bargaining they have, and should expect that the regime will not be allowed to survive. Getting from the point where they have a proof of concept launcher and weapon to the point where they have a system with bet your life reliability is a big jump.