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[North Korea] Tests Hydrogen Bomb. Call Vault Tec today to secure your tomorrow!
The Ender
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Good news, everyone!
While 2015 may have exited on a somewhat bitter note, with mass murders in Paris and bacteria becoming resistant to some of our best antibiotic drugs, the year of our Lord 2016 has opened with great promise: the courageous leadership of the great worker's state of North Korea have successfully tested their first hydrogen bomb. Soon our great leader shall use these weapons to cleanse away the class struggle, ushering in a new era of glorious prosperity for all! Long live the revolution!
Hasn't North Korea already tested nukes a few times?
Yes; but until now, all of their bombs have been (as far as nukes are concerned) low yield, simple fission warheads. Hydrogen bombs represent a different kind of paradigm because they can be much more powerful than their cousins for a similar cost & size.
It's also terrible for proliferation because parts of the process for making hydrogen bombs are kept secret by countries that have signed onto the non-proliferation treaty. The more people that figure-out the secret bits, the harder the information is to contain.
What do we know so far?
We don't know the yield of the bomb yet, but it was powerful enough to create a 5.1~ magnitude earthquake at the test site. This lends plenty of credibility to Pyongyang's claim that it was a successful hydrogen bomb test.
South Korea is holding an emergency cabinet session as I write this.
Is it time to put on my blue jumpsuit, fire up my Pip Boy app and head down to my makeshift vault?
While this is a bad way for geopolitics to start the new year, there's no reason to think (yet) that this actually presents a new level of threat from North Korea to anyone. They still haven't demonstrated a reliable long range delivery vehicle for these weapons.
We haven't had any kind of H-bomb standoff since the fucking cold war, though, and that is not a sword anyone is going to want swinging above their heads. It hardly needs to be said that nothing good or productive will come from Kim Jong Un showing-off his atomic fortitude to the world. I don't want to live in a world where we're back to state powers sending-up mushroom cloud 'tests' every few months, and NK's bullshittery could spark that kind of thing off.
Discuss nukes and/or the Kim dynasty and/or the developing situation ITT.
With Love and Courage
The Ender on
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It's time for China to stop fucking around in the South Sea and start putting some pressure on North Korea.
Well, don't hold your breath waiting on that. My impression is that the Chinese administration enjoys the drama that NK's dysfunctionality creates. "Oh, are you westerners having problems with our client state? That's really unfortunate for you,"
to say nothing of loss of life and the economic collapse in southeast asia
I'd say it's more likely it'd be bad PR for China, because if they don't want refugees, they certainly know how to dissuade them from coming in the country.
Calling it now, a week or two of hand wringing followed by business as usual.
I do wonder what the long term plan for the west is though. It might be taking them a long time but they are crawling toward true nuclear capability.
I'd doubt it.
The ground army is as much for domestic purposes as foreign ones; the state uses it not only as a policing force, but to maintain the illusion of the ongoing 'war' that they blame all of the infrastructure problems on.
Not that I don't see why other nations (especially South Korea) might be concerned about this, but I can see why Pyongyang deems nuclear deterrent necessary.
It will be interesting to see the administration's response, given previous statements that they "will not accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state" and would respond severely in such a scenario. My bet: sternly worded statements.
Edit - wrote Seoul instead of Pyongyang for some reason
China has a ton of money invested in the Western world. North Korea serves purely as a buffer between them and US-allied South Korea. If push comes to shove they will apply pressure to North Korea, because an insane country threatening to spark nuclear annihilation as your neighbor is a little concerning.
Googling around, I saw China's not amused about this one.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/06/north-korea-bomb-test-prompts-condemnation.html
Is that the wrong impression? I'm not saying it's by any means good, I just don't think NK is gearing up to start WW3.
To a certain extent, yes. NK uses these demonstrations politically to hold their neighbors, specifically SK and Japan, at gunpoint to demand concessions. The issue here is that NK isn't a traditional nation state when it comes to global geopolitics and rarely acts logically rather than emotionally given that the state is essentially whatever Kim Jong Un feels like that day. With Un's recent actions over the last few years, things are very tense and uncertain within NK right now and Un does not have the universal support his father did among the NK elite. This makes him more volatile and more likely to take action.
And, building a weapon which can operate on the ground (even a fission weapon) is at least a few orders of magnitude more simple than making one which can be loaded into a missile.
I've read that their power with NK has been slipping since the early 2000's and accelerated when Il died. I've also heard that China's not to happy (but can't do much) about NK running large amounts of meth across the border.
And while it's not good, NK's nuclear program barely scratches the top-10 when it comes to global security concerns. I'm more worried about Pakistan / India and Russia playing around in Eastern Europe than anything in Asia right now, because even if NK builds an H-bomb and delivery mechanism they still need the will to use it. The elite aren't entirely crazy, and are more concerned about maintaining their lifestyle than they are getting turned into a big pile of radioactive ash.
Actually, what we know right now is that a 5.1 magnitude earthquake is within the 7-8 kton range of previous A-bomb detonations and not the much much larger yield of a hydrogen bomb.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
With today's advances in parcel delivery, North Korea could have an H-bomb on your doorstep within 6-8 weeks!
That, or a deliberate fake.
You can't fake seismic events. There was a detonation of some kind.
Yeah, with an obvious "this isn't an earthquake" waveform.
Or Team America World Police turned out to be based on truth.
The more likely scenario, given previous events, is that North Korea is lying about having a hydrogen bomb. North Korea has a track record of lying about nuclear testing.
This wasn't enough boom to have an H bomb. Their prior "nuclear detonation" was the sort of nuke the US and Russia use for mailbox pranks, we have conventional explosives that make a bigger boom.
China makes a shit ton of money with Japan, the US, and SK. The very nations NK was supposed to be a buffer against. NK is sort of their pit bull to keep the neighbors out, only now it's rabid and nobody knows what to do about it.
Someone should send them a copy of Old Yeller
http://xkcd.com/1626/
The yield is still in dispute, but it's either on par with the most recent NK fission bomb test or a couple of notches below it.
...I just wanted to clarify here:
The largest conventional bombs available (Daisy Cutters) are nowhere close to the yield of even the smallest fission bombs. The Daisy Cutter has a yield of about 11~ tons of TNT; the weapon NK tested had a ballpark yield of about 7~ kilotons of TNT.
Of course, you can always assemble so much TNT that you create a roughly equivalent explosion, but the quantities involved are impractical for weaponization.
And of course, theres fuck-all anyone can do about it as long as China is backing them up.
And when they have a shit ton of arty pointed at Seoul.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
well yeah, there's that too.
They might not have a very good conventional military, but they have one hell of a terrorist threat.
if you don't love what you do, then whats the point?
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com