Posted on 08/10/2017 8:07:36 AM PDT by dangus
A nuclear exchange with North Korea might result in only hundreds of deaths, but one in the not-so-distant future could result in tens of millions.
Only hundreds? Is that insane? We're talking about NUCLEAR BOMBS, here, right?
Since miniaturization is technologically difficult, yet necessary for missile-borne bombs, North Korea would presumably arm its nuclear missiles with the SMALLEST bombs it has, not the largest. A mid-air on-target detonation would require very sensitive timing, so presumably it would be impact-triggered, and therefore ground-level. And Korea's furthest-range ICBMs would likely have very poor accuracy. So hitting a major city would require a major stroke of luck.
How much devastation would a bomb cause?
There is an online app called Nukemap, which allows a user to see how many people would be killed in the event of a nuclear bomb detonation. Users can select the location, size of the bomb, and whether it's a ground-level detonation or a mid-air detonation. Lethal effects include nuclear radiation, radiation poisoning, blast, and thermal radiation.
Randomly pick a location in the United States, and you'll probably find out that a Hiroshima-sized blast would kill a few hundred people. Quite possibly, a few dozen. You see, Hiroshima was a very densely populated city, and the bomb struck the population center. (Nagasaki missed its target, but nonetheless hit a very densely populated region.) Not many cities have that kind of population density. And you probably don't realize that about 99% of America is what YOU would call rural.
During the cold war, a bomb was accidentally dropped outside Goldsboro, NC. Since then, that population has surged. A Hiroshima-sized bomb would only kill a couple thousand. If North Korea pulled that off, it would be an unspeakable, horrific act of war. But not Armageddon. Not likely the size of the World Trade Center attacks. And only a fraction the size of what the World Trade Center attacks COULD have been if only the attack had struck after the business day started.
As a nation, we would survive it.
Even a bomb typical of our own missile arsenal would only have caused several thousand deaths.
With regards to that Goldsboro near-disaster, you may habe read that "the effects would have reached Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia or New York." You probably didn't read what those effects were: a slightly reduced rate of certain common cancers. And MAYBE a slightly elevated rate of rarer cancers. Such a bomb would probably save more lives in Baltimore than it would cost.
I think it's very important to get these facts out there. After Chernobyl, hundreds of thousands of babies were aborted for no damned reason at all. I guess people believed 1960s-era horror movies about what radiation does to humans. Very near the meltdown, there was an elevated rate of some cancers, like thyroid cancer. These were detectable largely because those cancers are otherwise so rare. There was a slightly elevated rate of certain birth defects, again, detectable because any other causes are so incredibly rare. But in the areas around Chernobyl, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, cancer rates are actually lower than normal. (We're waiting to see the long-term effects on the Japanese meltdown.)
The armageddon scenarios from the Cold War were based on nuclear bombs being dozens of times larger than anything North Korea is likely to build... and there being thousands of nuclear warheads launched.
Today, North Korea may or may not be able to strike an American city with a nuclear warhead. We may be able to pulverize them before a launch was possible. We may be able to knock down any missile before it reached the U.S. Those that reach the U.S. may not be those same missiles capable of being armed with nuclear warheads. (Even Kim only threatened Guam... probably for a reason.) Our risks are not existential.
But imagine a hundred nuclear bombs all falling in the vicinity of Los Angeles. Now, the fallout levels become easily deadly, over the homes of twenty-or-so million people. Now, we don't have enough cures for the radiation poisoning. Now, the infrastructure is irreparably damaged. Now, relief and rescue operations are overwhelmed. Now, the land itself becomes uninhabitable.
FOR DISCUSSION PURPOSES ONLY. I AM NOT AN EXPERT. I KNOW SLIGHTLY MORE THAN THE AVERAGE BEAR, BUT I AM USING ONLY THE SORT OF TOOLS AVAILABLE ON LINE.
Ah NO. Evidently You were not alive in the 50s and 60s. We had ABMSs THEN against Russian ICBMS. We have them NOW:http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/30/politics/pentagon-missile-test-north-korea-iran/index.html
Secondly, a Nuclear device would affect all the surrounding countries. Sheesh.
How did we deal with this in the 50s and 60s during the COLD WAR with Russia? he he They had way more sophisticated ICBMs than the NORKS? At one point we had bombers in the air 24/7 armed with Nuclear weapons that flew over the North Pole and back. Most here do not remember that.
Throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had been developing missile systems with the ability to shoot down incoming ICBM warheads. During this period, the US considered the defense of the US as part of reducing the overall damage inflicted in a full nuclear exchange. As part of this defense, Canada and the US established the North American Air Defense Command (now called North American Aerospace Defense Command).
By the early 1950s, US research on the Nike Zeus missile system had developed to the point where small improvements would allow it to be used as the basis of an operational ABM system. Work started on a short-range, high-speed counterpart known as Sprint to provide defense for the ABM sites themselves. By the mid-1960s, both systems showed enough promise to start development of base selection for a limited ABM system dubbed Sentinel. In 1967, the US announced that Sentinel itself would be scaled down to the smaller and less expensive Safeguard. Soviet doctrine called for development of its own ABM system and return to strategic parity with the US. This was achieved with the operational deployment of the A-35 ABM system and its successors, which remain operational to this day.
>> The Goldsboro bomb was an H-bomb that did not explode. I don’t see how you can compare an unexploded effects w/ an exploded one. <<
You misread me. The Goldsboro bomb caused ZERO deaths. I was reporting what it WOULD have caused had it detonated.
>> Had it exploded I’ll bet on a prevailing Easterly breeze Raleigh and surrounding would deserted today. On a S.Westerly breeze the Outer Banks would be off-limits.
Uh, no. There is a large, thriving, more populous-than-ever city right where the Hiroshima bomb detonated. Yours are precisely the false presumptions that I was correcting. The Goldsboro bomb may have been as much as 100 kt, not 15 kt, but the effect is LESS than 100/15, not MORE, nor exponential, as many people seem to think.
Excellent post. And its important to clarify for the know-nothings that the immediate effects of a ground burst would be LESS deadly.
Send a small non-nuke bomb to Kim’s kitchen and so limiting collaterals.
IC circuits, very low voltage computer circuits are much more vulnerable than manual switching circuits in the past.
IIRC an airburst H-bomb over the Pacific took out the grid in Hawaii, radios in Australia .
The dictators like to use “Sacrificial Pawns” or “Cats Paws” to do their dirty work.
Look at the Cubans in Africa doing the Soviet Union’s work.
Humans love symmetry, and that Korean Peninsula doesn’t look symmetrical to the Chinese.
China’s been hedging their bets with the South Koreans.
What they really want is a solution that unites Korea until control of the current South Korean government, but with the US out of the Peninsula, and South Korea, at least neutral, if not in the Chinese sphere of influence.
s/b
“What they really want is a solution that unites Korea under control of the current South Korean government”
About EMP:
The doom scenarios you read about EMP were based on hypothetical weapons designed to maximize the effects of EMP. In a Soviet test of a 300 kt mega-bomb, there was a surge triggering fuses and over-voltage protectors along the entirely of a 350-mile electrical system set up to monitor the strength of the EMP. But this bomb was 20 times more powerful than anything the North Koreans would be likely to have, and was detonated at an altitude that resulted in a Korean ICBM making it no further than the Sea of Japan. Oh yeah... and the nearby city of Karaganda (now Kazakhstan) was utterly unprepared for such a thing.
Just in case you missed that: The Soviet Union DELIBERATELY triggered an EMP over 20 times stronger than a North Korean warhead over its breadbasket at a time when there were NO protections from EMP. There were economic reprecussions: a fire in a Karaganda generating plant. That’s it.
This EMP talk shows the dangers North Korea could EVENTUALLY present, but it does not currently present those dangers.
To be honest with you, I don’t fear Kim Nutchucks at all.
I live near Seattle, which would be one of his first targets.
But to get a bomb the right size, and to launch it to hit Seattle, would be almost an impossible feat.
I fear an EMP burst way more.
Or what the Chinese or Russians might do.
Would China be the boss, in that case? Is Kim their wind up madman toy?
That's what my gut is saying. On the other hand, there are others in the Nork government that are even more hardline and anti-China, and those are the dangerous ones. Is Kim merely a figurehead?
I think those tests were at ground level of only a little above.
Norkea d0es not have an H-bomb. Yet. I am a believer that Norkea doesn’t have anything that China has not given to it.
The Chinese are doing their own work in Africa now. They have pretty close to colonized much of southern Africa.
Yep, I’m currently the owner of two cars, both (very well) made in Hiroshima. There’s a general funk in the West about anything containing the word “nuclear” or “atomic”, whatever. Looks like the rest of the world just moves on.
The Chinese have a history with Korea.
The Koreans are going to be a bit wary of them.
The Africans just think the Chinese are Santa Claus.
They were not detonated at high altitude. They were detonated near the surface, or far UNDER the surface. Only a small number of nuclear weapon tests were conducted above the atmosphere, all in the south Pacific. At least one of them produced EMP effects which affected Hawaii.
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