Guam prepares as North Korea threatened to fire nuclear missiles (Musudan's 1.2t payload)

HAGATNA, Guam ---- Almost 100 U.S army personnel will deploy to Guam in coming weeks as the Pentagon moves one of its missile defense systems designed to knock down hostile targets in the upper atmosphere.

But the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs each weighed two tons.

First nukes were overdesigned in several aspects. First, there was no time for much testing. There was only one test, and that was a stationary device on a tower, and nobody knew for a fact that it will explode. The droppable bomb was designed, built and dropped without complete testing. So it had to be designed with a lot of redundancy.

Then there was a concern what would happen if the airplane crashes on liftoff. There weren't too many safeties in the bomb. So it had to be loaded into the airplane partially assembled, and then an engineer would finish the assembly in flight. All this resulted in a larger design that was easier to work on.

After a while those issues were cleaned up. NK today does not need to wonder if the physical theory of nuclear chain reactions is valid. They only need to do very specific mechanical work - and even that is not easy for them, with their prehistoric machines. But on the other hand they don't have to deliver a 100 kT explosion. The western world today is pampered, enlightened, and delicate. A harsh word would send it reeling. A mere 5 kT nuke - which will have very limited effect on the ground - can result in surrender of many of those enlightened foes "if it will save just one life." France, for example, surrendered early in World War II. This happens when enough of the population doesn't care who exactly is ruling over them; when it's not a single nation anymore, bound by common ideals, but just a collection of strangers who couldn't care less about those common ideals.

The reports I’ve seen indicate five mobile units carrying Scuds, Nodongs are deployed to the coast of Hamgyong Province and at least two Musudans are ready for launch in Kangwon Province.

I would guess that they are looking for a simultaneous launch sometime in the next five days to test our ship-board missile defenses.

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