North Korea threatens nuclear attack

[sunnyside]

Who's he?

An R&B singer whose name I wrote down instead of Gordon Brown. I was up too late.

It won't be effective at all, the Aegis system can handle over a hundred incoming targets at once. One cruise or ballistic missile is not a challenge.

It can track a hundred targets at once. Which is not the same thing especially at short ranges. Aegis is the reason Iran might want to use a nuke on a carrier group though. If the ships were fairly defenseless a standard cruise missile would do. With a nuke you just have to get close.


As for the IAEA they can only tell what a program is doing at the moment. Not what it could be used for even the next day. Now granted there is some turnaround time to a weapons program. That actually, is the critical moment. If they kick inspectors.

As for the reactor it's started and stopped a couple times. But it's getting there. Surprising with all the oil revenue they can't clip along better with that. I suppose sanctions don't help... Still looks like what they really need is birth control.

[Tsukiyumi]

Personally, I'm a bit more worried about this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase_n ... case_nukes

Iran or North Korea come in a distant second to the threat of terrorists with a few of these.

[Graham Kennedy]

I've heard it said that you can not only tell the country of origin of a nuclear weapon, but often the specific reactor and even the year the material was produced.

http://www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publi ... DeGeer.pdf

This PDF article talks about analysis of nuclear bomb debris to determine the origin.

I do imagine that you would have to have samples from the reactor to compare it to... and I doubt Iran makes such things available. But if the material came back as not Russian, Chinese, British, etc... well then it's going to be pretty obvious who the culprit is.

And no, one bomb is not enough. Five bombs or twenty bombs are not enough. Do you really think the people in Iran are going to trade New York for the existence of their nation, and themselves?

[Aaron]

Personally, I'm a bit more worried about this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase_n ... case_nukes

Iran or North Korea come in a distant second to the threat of terrorists with a few of these.

Nuclear weapons have a very short shelf life, having to be rebuilt at least every few years. Those suitcase weapons have long since expired, unless people wish to claim that terrorists can rebuild them on their own.

[sunnyside]

This PDF article talks about analysis of nuclear bomb debris to determine the origin.

You might want to pull a quote out of there. What I read from it was that it's talking about analyzing the debris to determine how the weapon was built and operated. (things like proximity of components in the reaction and ratios of the reactants). And the purpose of analyzing the debris was for countries to figure out how to mimic the reaction.

I don't know about the shelf life of a nuclear weapon like that. But I do know I've heard numbers like 100 years in regards to shelf life. And I think that was for more complicated fusion weapons. But the more time that passes with those things the better.

I don't think they'd outright hit Israel or a US city unless they don't think they'd get caught (if they think they could get away with it though....). However again I'm not confident that a sunk carrier would result in our world leaders eradicating hundreds of thousands of Iranian civilians.

[Tsukiyumi]

I've never seen any figures on the half-life of fissionable materials like the ones in those suitcase bombs, either, so I couldn't say with any degree of certainty that they're useless. I just think that stopping proliferation into terrorist hands is a more important goal than worrying about Iran (though they do have this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoot_%28missile%29, which could certainly deliver a warhead if they had one).