LA Is Safe – For Now
Jim Dunnigan argues that it’s not yet time to lose sleep over North Korean nukes:
Most of the missiles available to the new nuclear powers can carry a half ton warhead. The U.S. had such warheads in service by 1954. But to do so required a lot more scientific and engineering talent than the new nuclear powers have. In addition, the bomb developers were able to test their designs. While powerful computers make it possible to do “virtual tests,” the new nuclear nations do not have access to the super-fast computers needed for this kind of testing. Perhaps more importantly, these new nuclear powers do not have access to the data from tests that were simulated, then run with a real weapon. In other words, you need to either do live tests, or have very expensive supercomputers, and the right software, to make sure your smaller warheads work. While China may have stolen a lot of the secret U.S. data on smaller nuclear warheads, it uncertain if any of that information has been passed on. In the end, you don’t have to get worried about North Korean or Iranian nuclear weapons unless there is news of smaller warheads that work.
Then again, it hardly takes an ICBM to deliver a bomb across the border into Iraq or South Korea.
Suicide killers don’t need missiles; a used pickup truck will do the job quite nicely.
If the proliferation of nuclear weapons in criminal and fanatic regimes is not stopped at the source, then the delivery of such bombs is not a matter of if, it is simply a matter of when and where.
Dunnigan may be completely correct about everything he says in this article. But if we wait until these regimes have developed small, missile-deliverable weapons before we consider the threat immediate, it will be way, way too late.
And with multiple possible sources for the weapons, we won’t even know where to deliver the payback.
TO: Jim Dunnigan
RE: Weapons Delivery Systems
Jim, you do good wargames. However, you’re off-base with this one.
Anybody with a big boat can deliver a nuke to LA.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
There’s one way that North Korea could use a single nuke to really hurt the entire rest of the world: fire it straight up and detonate it in space before reaching the natural Van Allen belts. The resulting artificial radiation belts created by the blast would cause heavy damage to satellites around the globe. It’s pretty low tech, and already been proven back in the late 50s/early 60s with Project Argus. Details on this are hard to come by, but here’s a snippet from a NASA educational page on auroras:
Sputnik was launched in October 1957, Explorer 1 was launched on the last day of January 1958, the newly discovered radiation belt was described that May, and the 3 bombs of “Project Argus” were exploded in August and September 1958, above an empty stretch of the South Atlantic. No observation broke the secrecy of the project, and no newspaper told about it at the time. But the bomb’s electrons were guided by their magnetic field lines to their other end, near the Azores Islands, and produced a bright aurora which was seen by observers aboard ships deliberately stationed there. The “artificial radiation belts” from the bombs lasted about 2 weeks and were monitored by Explorer 4, built by Van Allen for that purpose.
Four years later the US Air Force decided to repeat the experiment on a grand scale west of Hawaii, using a hydrogen bomb, about 1000 times more powerful. This time the auroral electrons were guided towards Samoa–close to the equator, in a region where auroras had never been seen. But the explosion was too close to the equator, in a region where trapping was much more efficient. The radiation belt hung around for years, not weeks, and quickly destroyed 3 satellites (including a British scientific satellite NASA had just graciously launched), by degrading their solar panels and depriving them of power. The Soviet Union also exploded H-bombs in space, but the following year brought the international test ban and all such experiments ended.
North Korea hasn’t signed on to the various non-proliferation treaties, nor has India or Pakistan. I don’t see North Korea doing it except as a complete last ditch effort if a US coalition threatened them from the south and the Chinese started massing troops on the north. However, given their technologically backwards nation, they wouldn’t have anything to lose by taking out most, if not all of the world’s satellites.
Cheers,
Benito
(Note: This isn’t an entirely new idea–I’ve seen it in at least one science fiction book, but I can’t recall the title. I just happened to think of it after reading something about Project Argus recently.)