North Korea

And "oops" as a reason is so much better, yes...

Depends where they are. If they are still up near the test sites in the Northern mountain, then they won't do much good, as by all accounts the things are so massive that they can't yet be missile mounted, and the DIA would see them moving them. An air attack is a non-starter, unless the USAF and US Army Air Defense are literally fused to the Idiot Ball, which seems highly unlikely. The Norks' only strategic bombers are Harbin H-5 models - a Chinese knock-off of a Soviet design that first flew nearly seventy years ago. The engines are North Korean knock-offs of Chinese knock-offs of Soviet knock-offs of a British design (the Rolls-Royce Nene, first designed 78 years ago which Britain gave to the USSR after the war as a goodwill present).

Then again, there are scary rumors that the Norks have found ways of making their nukes credible deterrents despite their inability to deliver them, such as nuclear sea and landmines.

The last one is possible. I reckon designing and deploying a nuclear sea mine would be beyond North Korea, given the engineering challenges of keeping the bloody thing watertight long enough.

edited 4th Feb '13 8:53:49 AM by Achaemenid

I dunno. If they can build nukes, then waterproof and corrosion resistant cases for them can't be too much of a stretch.

Wouldn't they also need to find a way to hide the radiation signature and to lay it in secret and to deploy it and guard it to stop the Americans or the ROKN finding it and disarming or nicking it. Plus finding a foolproof way of communicating with it - I wouldn't trust it to be permanently armed.

I'm sure their tech is good enough to make a basic impulse-activated nuclear sea mine, just not one interference-proof enough for people as paranoid as the Norks.

The problem is making a nuke small enough to fit into a bomb, missile or mine. If you want to bury it you can make it as big as you want.

The Norks air force is hampered by lack of fuel and spares. Their army could make it as far as Cheonan or Jecheon before losses and fuel forced them to ground. Depending on how far they are, they may have a nuke that could take up the entire warhead section of a missile that they'd aim like a V-2.

I assume the US could intercept something like a SCUD? I mean, wide fallout is better than Seoul-goodbye.

Yes.

That's re-assuring.

Here's an interesting tale I found in the Chosun-Ibo.

A North Korean private defected in October 2012 to the South after killing two officers - this is good.

He was able to cross the DMZ totally undetected, and had to knock on a ROKA barracks door to draw attention to himself - this is bad, but quite funny.

EDIT: And the North Korean propaganda agency has released a video of a North Korean cosmonaut flying around the world in a Space Shuttle and looking at the burning coastline of America. The footage of the USA's burning cities is nicked from Modern Warfare 3. I think that says it all.

edited 5th Feb '13 10:26:00 AM by Achaemenid

A man-made quake - at about 4.9 magnitude - has been detected in North Korea.

Any idea how long it takes to confirm that it was a nuke or are we relying on Korean state media?

Yaaayyy!!!

It was a nuke. Still well below Hiroshima levels, but worrying. On the other hand...the expected magnitude was 4.7 - I have my doubts about how well a 4.7 Mag nuke would actually do against Seoul - I mean Hiroshima was made of wood, a lot of it, and quite a bit of the stone buildings and many of the metal structures were fine. Not to mention Fat Man and Little Boy were 4 times the yield of the Nork nuke.

Still, the human casualties would be huge. This is a great worry, especially as they might use it as a tactical device to punch a hole in the DMZ.

They claim it was miniaturized (all that was miniaturized was the yield, it seems), but I'll believe it when I see it. They have no efficient delivery systems either - or at least ones that cannot be shot down.

edited 12th Feb '13 1:45:54 AM by Achaemenid

Couldn't a bomb be smuggled over (or under) the border and into South Korea?

It's entirely possible - detonating a nuclear mine under the DMZ and then pouring the KPA through it is a possibility. The trouble with a tunnel across the DMZ, though, is what to do on the other side. Any tunnel exit on the South side big enough to drive a truck through would be easily detected, and there's no way they have man-portables.

They might be able to put it on one of their subs, but I don't know how stealthy those things really are.

In films, they do a lot of scanning for radiation to find nuclear weapons. I have no idea if that is science or Hollywood Science, but if it is real they could try to track it that way.

edited 12th Feb '13 2:01:00 AM by Achaemenid

The North Korean nuclear weapons are probably huge. When they can barely smuggle a knife across or under the border it's hard to imagine how they'd smuggle something that can't even be mounted on a missile.

Indeed - though they may be aircraft-mountable. This◊ is Trinity, the first nuclear weapon ever made, and this◊ is RDS-1 First Lightning, the Soviets' first nuke - these are probably something like the North's bombs. The Harbin H-5 types the Norks operate might be able to carry one of these. The B-29 Superfortress could carry 10,000lb, the H-5 can manage 6,600lb, so if the Norks can make their bomb light enough they could potentially use it as a gravity bomb. Of course, that relies on their aircraft actually getting close enough to the target without being turned into shrapnel.

EDIT: Or maybe they only did it to get the Pope off the front pages

edited 12th Feb '13 3:06:29 AM by Achaemenid

A couple of decent articles from The Economist:

Are You Listening, America? Suggests that the NK government's 'smaller, lighter' demonstration is intended to warn America that the nuke they're making is for mounting on a missile capable of reaching them. Ie. They're trying to scare the USA back to the negotiating table.

Rumblings from below Discusses a capitalist class that's emerging despite the the despotic regime's attempts to destroy it. This is a rather encouraging article that indicates deepening cracks in the government's totalitarian control.

yeah, we need to consider everything. Though the NK Government values the nuke more for its fear and deterrence factor rather than its use as a weapon. They want to threaten other countries with imminent nuclear destruction far more than they want to actually cause that destruction and have themselves wiped out in response. So they're gonna spin nuclear weapons and delivery systems out for all the drama and terror that they can get.

edited 12th Feb '13 5:53:40 AM by betaalpha

Does North Korea have access to ports? Well yeah. Can they hire Chinese-flagged freighters. Well yeah. Do they know the existence of ISO standard containers? Well yeah. Do they really need to miniaturize one of those devices much to get them to fit inside an ISO standard container? Well, nope.

Can they get one of those containers heavily lead-lined so as to defeat the kind of cursory custom inspection that they would face in most countries on the planet with port facilities, particularly when there are still millions of containers being shipped, and with customs staff being sacked in a lot of countries due to austerity? Well yeah.

Stop thinking about devices in terms of being able to air drop them or using missiles. Or the last thing you see may be the flash of one of their devices initiating inside the Port of Los Angeles, Hamburg or Rotterdam. Just because the Americans dropped two bombs on Japan from B-29 bombers doesn't mean the North Koreans have to copy them if they ever really got pissed at their enemies.

edited 12th Feb '13 5:41:01 AM by TamH70

Cue a poor cargo ship going sky-high in the middle of the ocean somewhere, as the timer goes wonky.

Yup: I have that much faith in NK attention to detail.

Again, the regime can't use outside aggression to deal with their internal problems. They know it. They also know that any detonation of a nuke outside their borders will result in the U.S. glassing everything between the DMZ and the Yalun River.

Either way, if that happens, it would be a Bad Thing. The again, the trigger could be the old IED approach: use a mobile phone as trigger. Then again, I'd expect they'd Nuke the middle of Soeul*

Then again, if the container does gets run though an X-ray machine (and it doesn't match the manifest) — the container would be immediately become a suspect package.

edited 12th Feb '13 6:17:29 AM by Greenmantle

Timers are unreliable. Satellite phones are (relatively) cheap, even for countries like North Korea. If I was going to initiate a ship-borne nuclear device that is how I would do it. Given the strength of satellite phone signals only gets better every year, there is not many countries on the planet with a coastline and a port that would be safe.

Never underestimate your opponent. It was true when Sifu Bruce Lee said it in "Enter the Dragon" and it is true now.

While the Norks aren't exactly the model of rationality, regardless of who's POTUS I think their senior leadership is aware that if they do detonate a nuke in the US (no matter the delivery method) and it's discovered they were responsible, at the very least their capital will be reduced to nothing but radioactive rubble, and at worse they're permanently out of a cushy job and the power that goes with it because all that's left of them is a shadow burned into the ground by a packet or so of Instant Sunshine(tm).

Just threatening it is another matter, though, and to a degree that is dependent on the POTUS at the time.

edited 12th Feb '13 6:21:44 AM by Nohbody

Never underestimate your opponent's capability to be a complete idiot. If the North Korean junta ever seriously thought that they were going to lose power or get just plain murdered, ya think they would hesitate to bring the temple down around themselves as long as they took some of their enemies down with them?

The Norks are not rational actors.

The Telegraph cartoonist has a pretty good take.