60 years ago it took several years from fission to fusion bomb. H-bomb is simple once you got the fission one. NK got their first fission several years ago. So it is about time.
It is frequently suggested that NK explosions are [half]failures because of low yields. Well, making low yield fission or fusion bomb is actually much harder then a powerful one and historically the pinnacle of nukes have been the low yield "neutron" ones. The low yield ones are also much more scarier as a weapon because they require lower threshold of craziness to use - i.e. sending a 1MT ballistic missile on a city even Kim III may be not ready to order while 0.5KT is just like that Chinese port explosion several month ago.
Anyway, giving the amount of tech assistance NK got in 199x from former Soviet researchers, one can only blame NK economy on why it has been taking them so long to join the club.
Making nukes out of small amounts of plutonium is indeed hard to do but making a small explosion using a large amount of plutonium is much easier than making a large explosion from a large amount of plutonium.
Exactly. If NK's tests are low-yield because they're testing miniaturized devices intended to produce a low yield, that's scary. But it's far more likely that they're trying to make a bigger bang and it's just not working right.
I don't know that "simple" is a good description. The key design concepts are known, yes; but the level of technical precision and skill required to build a fusion bomb that will work is much higher than what is required to build a basic fission bomb that will work.
Last time North Korea did nuclear test, Comprehensive Nulcear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization(CTBTO)'s radionuclide monitoring station at Takasaki, Japan successfully detected Xenon. So let's wait for CTBTO.
"At 01:30:00 (UTC) on 06 January 2016 the CTBTO's monitoring stations picked up an unusual seismic event in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The location is very similar to the event our system registered on 12 February 2013. Our initial location estimate shows that the event took place in the area of the DPRK’s nuclear test site. The DPRK also claimed today that it has conducted yet another nuclear test, the fourth since 2006."
>On February 11, 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey detected a magnitude 5.1 seismic disturbance,[13] reported to be a third underground nuclear test.[14] North Korea has officially reported it as a successful nuclear test with a lighter warhead that delivers more force than before, but has not revealed the exact yield. Multiple South Korean sources estimate the yield at 6–9 kilotons, while the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources estimates the yield at 40 kilotons.[15][16][17]
If that was a hydrogen bomb test, it sounds an awful lot like the trigger did not achieve the intended criticality with respect to the fusion component. This would not be surprising in that their prior fission tests also had dubious yields.
I suspect that this was a very powerful (for NK) fissile weapon and not an actual hydrogen bomb as claimed (regardless of if they had fusible materials in the device).
In arguments over the relative safeness of the world it is often pointed out that relatively few people have died recently in terrorist attacks, but as N. N. Taleb points out, the distribution of deaths by terrorist attacks is a fat tailed one: the current average does not preclude much higher future numbers. Such devices as this in the hands of such actors as NK give us more concrete feelings for the real risks involved. More focus needs to be paid to these sorts of risks, we will be lucky to live out our lives without a major nuclear terrorism event.
I agree, but this is such a different class of threat with such different mitigations that it doesn't really belong in the same category as what we normally think of as "terrorism." Fighting small-time groups like al Qaeda and ISIS doesn't help prevent a nuclear attack by the likes of North Korea, and makes things worse by diverting attention and resources. So while this is an excellent argument for "try very hard to make sure North Korea doesn't nuke anything" it is IMO a counterargument for "maintain or ramp up the Global War on Terror."
> we will be lucky to live out our lives without a major nuclear terrorism event.
This sentiment comes to my mind quite frequently. Part of me can't believe that there hasn't been some sort of nuclear event already. Being only 25, I feel like such an event is inevitable in my life and have a really hard time convincing myself otherwise.
Try to compare it with the entire New York area, or the entire United States. It's a minor event. It won't destroy a country. Having one nuke doesn't make you a danger on a geopolitical scale.
That said, such attack would obviously be a horrible thing, and reasonable preventive efforts are justified. The key word being reasonable.
Minor in comparison to the scale of a country. Especially if you consider that the yield you can expect from anyone who is not Russia or the US will level at most a district of a large western city.
In no way I want to imply that such an event would not be absolutely horrible and an act of evil. But considering the actual damage that nukes do is what finally cured me of being scared shitless of nuke-wielding terrorists. And yes, I used to be really scared of that.
The Russians, the terrorists, and NK - oh my. Everyone must hand over a very large chunk of your paycheck to the defense industry or they bad guys going to come get all of us in our sleep!
Well, the Russians are a convenient threat, but they are compatible with us (in terms of views), reasonable, and educated people. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey are the real enemies of the Western civilization and I can't believe we allow them to be our allies! I personally don't know much abut North Korea, and although it's definitely a threat, I feel that all this is just a show.
Ish. How much do you know about the Russian cultural psyche?
I'm not disagreeing that the paranoia around American<->Russian relations isn't massively overblown, but I think you underestimate the aspirations of the Russian ruling class, and the degree to which the working class would bend to those aspirations if called upon (forced to).
I'm Bulgarian, I know a lot of Russians, I've been raised with the Russian culture during communism, and I've been living 16 years in California. Russia is a powerful country, but I think China is a much bigger threat to the US than Russia!
South Korea is used to it, in fact war never officially ended between NK and SK.
North Korea always had guns and South Koreans are prepared for the worst. The only way the NK regime could survive(international aid) is looking crazy, but not too much. Too much and they will be wiped from the face of earth. Too little and they won't get aid, and people will revolt against people in power.
Disagree. The chances of NK using a nuclear weapon offensively is 0.03% They're crazy in Pyongyang, but not stupid. Same situation if Iran builds one. Doing so would be suicide, and they know it. This is about defense.
Also, I'm glad you brought up the point about a neighbor with the gun. When somebody has a gun, you're not likely to walk over and screw with them. Nuclear weapons have lead to a great peace between nation-states.
The MAD doctrine seems to have worked with binary superpowers up through the 80's.
But, I think its an open (and rather scary) question as to whether MAD will continue to work with multiple parties some of whom are batshit crazy and have demonstrated utter disregard for the safety and well-being of their populace.
Is their leadership insane enough to sit in a well-stocked bunker while setting off an H-Bomb in South Korea or elsewhere.... umm yeah, I think so.
Let's hope. The world did survive the breakup of the soviet union, which left nuclear weapons and material all over the former soviet block without a major incident. If they do set off their one bomb (under the slim chance they could even deliver it), it would be utterly terrible. End of a major city? Probably. But not the end of the world. Japan, South Korea and the US would wipe NK out so fast they wouldn't even know what hit them. The end of North Korea regime? For sure.
> South Korea and the US would wipe NK out so fast they wouldn't even know what hit them. The end of North Korea regime? For sure.
Let's not forget about the millions North Koreans who would die as a result. They're people, and the number of them who are culpable for their regime's madness is a rounding error.
Yes. Although MAD doesn't necessarily require the end of the world (eg nuclear winter), or even the end of a regime. It just depends on consequences which are "unbearable" for either nation.
I've always felt that the best strategy against NK is to simply wait for the regime to collapse on its own (along with sanctions that isolate them, FWIW). This is fine as long as they don't try to invade South Korea, leading to swift US-backed retaliation. But perhaps now as they continue to develop and "show off" their nukes, they'll feel emboldened to "try something" before their time runs out?
By the way, I would like to see US & Russia decrease their nuclear arsenal size by half or more. But there's no denial that since the advent and usage of the nuclear weapon, there's been no major world war. We're in one of the, if not the most, peaceful times in recorded human history. Even considering the current instability in the middle east.
Right, it has led to great peace among nation-states, except for the fact that rogue actors can easily acquire nuclear materiel in the former Soviet republics.
They don't actually believe they are Gods, of course. They project this image to maintain control of a brainwashed populace. I'd say their leadership is rather rational for their objective (which is to maintain total control and thwart intervention of the west).
My worry is that someone in a leadership position might eventually start to believe their own propaganda. Not necessarily anyone in there now, but maybe a True Believer one-level down who finally gets fed up with realpolitik and compromise and decides to try to take over.
Getting to play in the south China sea at the expense of instability in east Asia is probably not the bargain they are after.
NK is to China what the sidekick is to the strongman. or the Capo to the Godfather. He's insufferable and creates you headaches, and provides diversion, but he's your sidekick... except if you go to far one day, it'll be goodbye.
I wonder how much those countries profit from NK. A typical pattern with undeveloped countries is they give up resources cheaply in exchange for high tech.
I thought the only reason why China supported NK was because they don't want to clean up after a fallen regime and deal with the stream of refugees. Giving NK a H-bomb would not help with that goal, it'd increase instability if anything.
I don't know much about geopolitics so I could be very wrong.
NK having an H-bomb makes it far less likely for other countries to try and destablize NK. Additionally, if they start to get destbalized, then having a bomb makes it far more likely that countries like the US would support the regime (because, as much as we do not like the idea of NK having a nuclear weapon, it is still preferable to all of the groups that will take control of it after NK falls)
It depends WHY it falls. The existing system is almost completely military with a sorta civilian mostly hereditary aristocracy leading it. So if it falls because the military collapses it'll be nearly a wasteland, total anarchy, but if the military stays in total power then instead of hereditary civilian aristocracy they'll have a genuine combat soldier (or at least a semi-experienced general) in charge.
At the very tippy top the Chinese like their buffer states, and are not going to be happy with reunification with SK. Of course the same people said the same things about Eastern Germany.
But dropping a bomb like that on Japan, US, S. Korea will kill skilled, educated people, destroy their technology, infrastructure and put country to a recession. Dropping it on NK will, like, kill thousands of slaves and destroy no meaningful infrastructure.
Agreed. But there's a potential moral debate to be had around the subject.
Imagine if you were given this scenario: "x" people will be killed tomorrow, you can't change that. There are three options for which people will be killed, either "well-off", "in poverty" or "random". You can choose one of the three, if you don't make a choice then one of the three will be randomly picked and the deaths still occur.
Would killing the people in poverty be better because you're wiping out more misery, would it be worse because you're letting financial state influence death?
And as much as ethically we want to think that all people are equal, let's not forget that most armys would be willing to kill 10 opponents to save the life of 1 colleague, and taking the US as an example I suspect (could be wrong..) a poll of the US would see most people willing to kill 10 North Koreans to save the life of 1 American, without having any other information about the 11 people who might die.
I think you could use anyone as an example. It's always easier to ignore people you don't know than the people you do. I imagine most people would pick a family member over people they don't know.
It matters that they NK people are slaves to their government. Killing the people will not influence the government like it would in parts of the world with better morality.
If NK regime falls down, likely it's going to be South Korea who is going to get refugees and to clean up the mess, since their long-term objective is to unify Korea and only the NK regime is preventing that.
The problem China does not want to have is a US ally at his border.
I am 99% sure that both China and the US would be happy with a deal along the lines of "The regeime goes, but NK stays a Chinese satellite", assuming that such a deal were feasible without risking huge destruction and loss of life.
In both these cases (NK and Pakistan, assuming NK got tech from China), was there a lot of money involved? I mean, does China do it also for the money, or is it mostly geopolitical influence?
What would the Chine government's motive be to help the Kim government upgrade to H-Bombs? They're already a political liability and most people in the region are nervous about them having atom bombs in the first place. It just seems like a bad idea.
at one time that might have been true but I would suspect that rational heads in China would not want to give such technology to an inherently unstable regime. Similar to how Russia operated, their allies might end up with nukes in their territory but they were Russian nukes, same as the US.
In the last decade or two, I doubt China wants a more dangerous North Korea. It could be that NK is attempting to play China like it plays the rest of the world. We always assume China is pulling all the strings but maybe NK knows some strings it can pull too
> unlike Iran we are never going to give a damn, politically, morally or otherwise.
Disagree, the US troops and mines have been there for a long time. South Korea is doing well exactly because the world cared and the US in particular continues to.
Iran by itself hasn't attacked another another country for more 2 centuries (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/20121248513...). Meanwhile, not only all our countries did it in the very last decade, but we surrounded Iran with military bases.
So we are not doing it because Iran is a threat. Occidental countries are technically more threatening (http://www.globalresearch.ca/we-re-going-to-take-out-7-count...), we just don't see it because we don't threaten each other. We are doing it for other reasons.
They got oil and a strategic position in the middlewest, There is probably a lot more to know to understand the motivation to make it the number one enemy.
Bottom line, we are not good doers, and attacking NK doesn't bring anything to our table, so we won't do it.
Uh, we invaded Iraq and absolutely destroyed the country and decimated the population - because we were going to be "greeted as liberators".
Certainly the people of North Korea need liberators, even if it takes them a few generations to appreciate it.
South Koreans don't need to be saved, North Koreans do.
However the entire world should be doing the liberation, not just the USA. In fact for once maybe they can leave us out of it and just tell China "end this" or we'll destroy your economy by not buying anything from you for as long as we can.
But hell, look at Syria and the refugee crisis. Imagine if Assad had nuclear weapons.
This is a comfortable stance to take 70 years after the fact.
In WWII: Over 60 million people were killed, which was about 3% of the 1940 world population (est. 2.3 billion).
The US ended the war in the pacific with those bombs(129,000–246,000+ killed), who knows how many more would have died with an invasion of Japan. The second would not have been dropped if the Japanese had surrounded and ended the war. BTW, the US did not start the war. I'm not saying I support it, I'm just saying stop Monday morning quarterbacking.
The US could have "ended" the war by simply walking away. At that stage the war was effectively won and dropping the Bombs had very little to do with military strategy.
The argument that the Bombs "ended the war" is patent bs, and it keeps being repeated unchallenged as a justification for what was effectively a war crime.
Actually, even after the bombs were dropped, several high-ranking Japanese military officials were planning a coup to stop those were planning on surrendering to the Allies at that point. There was significant support to fight until the very last.
It is debatable where it was necessary to drop the bombs on populated areas as opposed to Tokyo Bay, but it is without a doubt that the nuclear bomb and subsequent further threat ended the conflict.
And what would they do ? Swim to California with knifes between their teeth ? Japan posed no thread to the US at that stage of the war. The conflict was over, the allies have won.
The allies had hardly won. Much of Asia was still under Japanese rule. The Japanese still controlled Singapore, Hong Kong, massive swaths of China and South East Asia, Korea, Taiwan, etc. The idea that the US could have simply "walked away" at that point is ludicrous.
I cannot remember the exact number but since the Japanese had so many islands as well as mainland Japan, the cost of invasion in lives (Western and Japanese) was massive.
Of course it was not just a numbers decision, there was certainly some posturing for the post war world.
The US was very concerned that Russia would not honor the agreements around splitting up Korea and roll on into Seoul.
Then you had Germany and Eastern Europe to think about.
It is interesting to theorize what would've happened after the war if the U.S. had not developed the bomb or if the U.S. had developed it but chose not to use it.
Nonsense. Russia would have occupied Tokyo within the month, maybe less, Japan was defeated, and thoroughly. The US needed Japan to surrender to them, not Russia, and so it was.
The USSR had no real amphibious capability to carry out such a plan.
Civilians were dying at a rate of something like a quarter million per month in all the various Japanese-occupied areas at this point in the war. If the atomic bombings sped up the surrender by just three weeks they were a net win in terms of lives. (And yeah, I know how morally difficult that calculation is, but that's war.)
I'd assume that rather than saying it's a good thing he's just accusing the US (and friends of the US) of being hypocritical. A tired and fairly pointless thing to say, but not as bad as saying that a nuclear-armed NK is a good thing.
I get where you're coming from and I agree that's probably not what he meant (but who knows). But his wording does leave open the interpretation that "Bad Thing happened 70 years ago. This is Less Bad than Bad Thing so it isn't really all that Bad."
Who cares about moral ground? I want as few countries to have nuclear weapons as possible, especially completely insane ones like North Korea. If it's immoral to deny their "sovereign right" then hell yes, let's be immoral.
To my knowledge, none of the listed countries actively promote a rhetoric that involves annihilating another country for some injustices in the past, perceived or otherwise. Similarly, none of them have adopted a military doctrine along those lines.
No chance. The problems associated with the sanctions were far more of a problem for the Ayatollahs than the benefits of having a nuclear weapon. Obama was spot on with the diplomatic solution.
Pretty sure Iran is quite fine with its proxy wars and regional destabilisation. They are getting pretty good at it and causing far more headaches for the West.
I seriously doubt that the American population is that gullible. On top of that hispanics and blacks hate him. Those two groups represent a large voting block. Other groups like woman, muslim, and asians don't appear to like him very much so I don't see how he is going to win.
Black voters seem likely to vote in higher numbers for Trump than any other Republican as do working class White Democrats. That isn't to say Trump will win those demographics, but 20% of the Black vote should be enough for any Republican to win nationally when the Republican average is 5% lately.
Hispanics don't vote in large numbers and Chicanos -- the only category Trump might be especially unpopular with -- overwhelmingly don't live in swing states or turn out to vote. Muslims don't make up a large voting block and already are overwhelmingly Democrats.
I'm not predicting a Trump victory, but you are far too sanguine about his chances and the underlying demographic realities.
Well,every vote Trump looses counts. The White vote is not one unified voting block that will vote republican. You have his main supporters that will vote for him no matter what and then you have everybody else. Not every republican will vote for him. Unless he can unify the white vote, doubt it, then how is supposed to win?
I guess the newspaper articles claiming you need certain percentage of Hispanics to win the presidency have lied. I will not debate you on this point since I'm no expert. Add to the fact that he has pissed off more people than just Latinos and his chances appear slimmer. But maybe I'm just misinformed.
The fact that the measurements we got so far show it matches their previous detonation makes me wonder if it was an H-Bomb, or at least if it was a successful one. Since they have a fission bomb as part of the core, it could just be a failed H-bomb or, as someone else said, an attempt at a tritium enriched bomb.
As far as U.S. presidential politics goes, meh, it's 10 months from the election, we don't even know who the candidates will be for either (especially the GOP), and the only people who should be sweating are S. Korea and Japan.
How so? So Trump can aggressively address a nuclear armed country. This is ridiculous line of thinking. Only thing he will be good for is making empty threats like Kim Jong. And will surely get US isolated by those rhetorics.
Trump will just say he's going to bomb NK flat and that'll energize the base that thinks Obama is a total coward for not killing all of those filthy foreigners already.
The real question is whether there are enough people who will follow his kind of pandering. It seems obvious that the guy has absolutely no principles. He will say anything. I don't think there are enough of of them. If there are enough of them then I'm being stupidly naive and have not read the mood of the country correctly. If so we are all fucked, white, yellow, brown, black.
That assumes (a) that the US population wants a nuclear war and (b) the electoral college math has changed. I doubt North Korea and their routine blustering will have an effect on either.
Wow. I merely identified a possible voter inflection point based on current events --and I was hoping for an insightful, or at least informed, response.
For those of you who apparently missed the "American Politics" course in your higher education, Democrats have been better at resolving domestic challenges while Republicans have done better on international issues.
Not to be too cynical (which I doubt is possible when it comes to US politics) but I suspect that there will be no lack of demagoguery on either side of the aisle this year, irrespective of the actions of North Korea.
This seems incredibly unlikely. Anyone with a good machine shop and some fissile material can build a fission bomb in their garage (ok, it's not that easy). But fusion bombs are another beast altogether.
Fusion bombs work by setting off a fission primary stage inside a closed container, which ignites fusion in a deuterium secondary stage. But the devil is in the details. The energy from the primary (in the form of either neutrons, heat, or X-rays; which one it is is highly classified) needs to be focused through an interstage (the details of which are, again, classified) into some sort of styrofoam (really) medium which turns into plasma. This somehow starts fusing the deuterium inside it, which involves the use of a fissile "spark plug" to produce more neutrons. And deuterium isn't that easy to come by. The whole process is so tricky that the British couldn't get it to work for a long time after the Americans gave them plans.
I like to think that NK built their bomb based on plans they found on the Internet from some Anarchist Cookbook wannabe and are now scratching their heads as to why it didn't work properly.
It is frequently suggested that NK explosions are [half]failures because of low yields. Well, making low yield fission or fusion bomb is actually much harder then a powerful one and historically the pinnacle of nukes have been the low yield "neutron" ones. The low yield ones are also much more scarier as a weapon because they require lower threshold of craziness to use - i.e. sending a 1MT ballistic missile on a city even Kim III may be not ready to order while 0.5KT is just like that Chinese port explosion several month ago.
Anyway, giving the amount of tech assistance NK got in 199x from former Soviet researchers, one can only blame NK economy on why it has been taking them so long to join the club.