North Korea appears to have gone ahead and done it...

[Billy Joe Bob]

on a more serious note...
a quote from Einstien: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

[cav58d]

News reports are saying NK was hoping to have a weapon along the lines of 400kilotons, and has fallen short...How big were the A bombs dropped in 45, and how would compare even 100 kilotons to that?

[J_A_B]

"How big were the A bombs dropped in 45, and how would compare even 100 kilotons to that?"

I believe the Hiroshima bomb was on the order of 15 kilotons.  

J_A_B

[Neubob]

Originally posted by cav58d
News reports are saying NK was hoping to have a weapon along the lines of 400kilotons, and has fallen short...How big were the A bombs dropped in 45, and how would compare even 100 kilotons to that?

Fat man(Nagasaki) yielded 21 kilotons. Little Boy(Hiroshima), about 15.

How do they compare to 100 kilotons? Do the math.

The scary thing is that within 10 years of those two bombings, the Superpowers were testing weapons upwards of 1000 times that power, culminating in the 57 megaton behemoth exploded by the soviets in 1961. The original design called for a weapon that would yield an even 100 megatons, but they decided to scale it down by substituting certain radioactive components with lead. I believe the quote from Kruschev was 'we didn't want to end up breaking our own windows when it went off'.

PS: USGS just confirmed a 4.2 magnitude 'seismic event' in North Korea.

[Auger]

Frankly, I think every country should have nukes.  Balance of power and all that.  It will make any first use of nuclear weapons a suicide mission when all of the other countries dump on the initiator.  It may also get the electorate in the professed "free" countries to pay a bit more attention to whom they vote into office.

[Debonair]

the tsar bomb.
it pwnd.
iirc the same concept as the castle bravo device, but bigger & without the last fission stage active too
zOMG the test device was delivered by air


http://www.archive.org/details/MilitaryEffectsStudiesonOperationCastle1954
http://www.archive.org/details/CastleCommandersReport1954

[Excel1]

Originally posted by Auger
Frankly, I think every country should have nukes.  Balance of power and all that.  It will make any first use of nuclear weapons a suicide mission when all of the other countries dump on the initiator.  It may also get the electorate in the professed "free" countries to pay a bit more attention to whom they vote into office.

MAD may have worked fine during the cold war but those days are long gone.

There's to many nations run by nutters in the world that would like to use nukes if they had them, or even more likely, they would provide them to terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to use them.

[Hap]

Originally posted by Billy Joe Bob
on a more serious note...
a quote from Einstien: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

Billy, thanks for the thoughtful post.

hap

[Stang]

Mutual Assured Destruction was a farce of a policy that nearly killed us more than once.

[Nilsen]

Seriously... who cares if he has it?

Kim Ill like all them commie leaders is to eager to remain alive and in power to use it. Getting it is a PR stunt to raise the morale of his people and look like a big boy in the region. I would be far more worried if someone like Osama or his followers had it.

[AquaShrimp]

North Korea has on the order of 50 submarines.  If they had to, they could sneak one of their boats onto the shores of any country with a coastline, and detonate the weapon.

[mosgood]

So, what happens if NK sells one of these nukes to a terrorist element?  Can we track the bomb, by the radioactive signiture after it goes off in Los Angeles, DC or NY back to NK?

Would we destroy NK by nuclear attack if they did?  Or would we worry to much about Russia or China getting too pissed off about us dropping nukes near their border?

[Excel1]

Originally posted by Stang
Mutual Assured Destruction was a farce of a policy that nearly killed us more than once.

But it didn't.

MAD is aptly named, and seemingly a ludicrous situation to be in , but I would have thought it must have played a part in preventing a strategic nuclear war with the Soviets just by the necessity of it's existence and use.

[rpm]

Originally posted by mosgood
So, what happens if NK sells one of these nukes to a terrorist element?  Can we track the bomb, by the radioactive signiture after it goes off in Los Angeles, DC or NY back to NK?

Would we destroy NK by nuclear attack if they did?  Or would we worry to much about Russia or China getting too pissed off about us dropping nukes near their border?

If a nuke attack was traced back to NK, I would expect no less than an equal reply not nessessarily traced back to the US. A good time to earn many brownie points and set nuclear policy.

[AquaShrimp]

How does a kid with a rock (North Korea) hurt a man with a rifle (USA)?  By waiting until someone else staggers the man, perhaps knocking him down, then running up and smashing his head.

Real life situation:  The US gets hit by another terrorist attack.  Confusion and casualties.  Then a nuclear weapon goes off in DC.

Nuclear weapons can be traced to where they were mined.  Most of Russias weapons were mined in China for example.  Whos to say NKs werent mined there too?