Well in a solid fuel missile, there was simply no way it was going to explode due to any kind of external damage (or at all, solid fuel does not explode). Good that nuclear safety of the warhead itself worked well, as none of the explosive lenses gone off.
Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed
201–210 of 250 posts
Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
not to mention gaddafi
Nuclear weapons wouldn't have help Gaddafi anyways. He didn't have a working weapon nor a reliable way to delivering it. Also, what was he going to do with one? Threaten the US with one if the internal rebellions don't stop? Threaten to nuke his own people? There's an illusion of the utility of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons might be OK if you want to destroy masses of conventional armies or destroy the ability of…
"Internal" rebellions in nations tend to be sponsored and supported by other nations. A leaked diplomatic cable [1] from 2009 described Gaddafi as "an important ally in the war on terrorism, noting that common enemies sometimes make better friends." The "common enemy" Senator Lieberman was referring to are groups we were calling terrorists at the time. They're the same groups that we would decide to arm, support, and ultimately help overthrow Libya 2 years later.
This is hardly a secret and a retaliatory strike from Libya would have been justified. And ultimately that's what nukes provide. North Korea is not deterring a US invasion by threatening to nuke our invading soldiers. They're deterring an invasion by implicitly threatening to nuke South Korea. If the US invaded North Korea and it ended up costing millons of lives and billions/trillions of damage in South Korea, the responsibility for that change would lay with the US as they threw the first punch. On the other hand, if North Korea engaged in any substantial preemptive attack themselves - then any loss of life could be argued as saving even more lives; similar to how we ended WW2 by nuking hundreds of thousands of otherwise innocent civilians.
[1] - https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09TRIPOLI677_a.html
Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Had Gaddafi developed a working nuclear bomb with the necessary delivery mechanism, would France/UK/US have launched a campaign that ultimately ended with his death? We will never know, only speculate, but North Korea is betting that the answer to this question is "no".
On the other hand, the US didn't launch a campaign that ended in the NK ruler's death before they had nukes, either...
The reason for this is arguably because we could not. North Korea borders both China and what was at the time the Soviet Union. The cliff notes of the Korean War (at least after the point of division and active war) are that North Korea decided to invade South Korea. They had South Korea on the brink of destruction and then the UN/US intervened on behalf of South Korea.
The US/UN enforces then pushed the North Korean forces back north and to the brink of destruction. Then Chinese (and to a much lesser degree Soviet) forces intervened on behalf of North Korea and pushed US/UN forces back beginning a sort of see-saw that ended up with neither coalition able to make meaningful progress. After some time of a back and forth, an armistice was signed.
I think it's somewhat unclear how the balance of powers changed in the time after this.
Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even if Ukraine had nukes, would it have threatened and actually have the will to use it over the lost of the Crimea? Over a conventional invasion by a neighboring nation-state with massive conventional superiority with a paper-thin cover story? Probably. I mean, that’s why the USSR didn't pull that stunt against any of the NATO countries bordering its satellites, ever, even though they did similar things to other…
So what would Ukraine have done if they had nukes? Nuked the enemy troops in the Crimaea, with their own population in the way? Or bomb some Russian city and start a nuclear war ...against the second larges nuclear power? Honestly, use of nuclear weapons just sounds like pure madness, no matter what the threat one is under. I mean, unless we're talking about an alien invasion (and I'm not impartial to keeping around…
Ukraine doesn't consider Crimea inhabitants Ukrainians. They call them traitors and hate them (it's not an official position, just guessing from comments in social media - if you can read Russian, you'll find such comments easily)
Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
But these devices always exist as one part of a wider technical and human system. It seems unwise to separate the two when safety could be comprised by a failure in any part of the system.
Perhaps I am ignorant and don't know it, but the USSR collapsed, its nuclear arsenal was split, and nothing awful happened. Even during one of the most spectacular system-wide failures in modern history, a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons was largely kept safe and in tact.
Maybe we just got lucky? I don't think 60 years of history is enough to draw conclusions about the systematic safety of nuclear weapons. Especially when so many facts are unavoidably restricted.
It is easy to become prone to a sort of survivorship bias. But nuclear proliferation guarantees that we will have more and more opportunities to test that safety. It only needs to fail once to be catastrophic at which point your argument would seem a little flawed.
Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have the capability to annihilate as much of NK as we need to prevent a counterattack ...from North Korea If we start launching nukes in the direction of NK, how does China know it's going to stop in NK and not hit them? Do we call them up first? Then what do they say? Is it totally out of the question that China would panic (or reason?) and counterattack? NK doesn't exist in a vacuum, and in fact NK wouldn't ex…
It's simple orbital mechanics to calculate the trajectory. ICBMs aren't like planes, it's not like they just fly to the target and stop. It's powered during the first minutes of flight and then it just coasts from there. The exception to this is MIRV ICBMs where warheads are deployed one at a time and the final stage changes orbit a bit before releasing the next warhead. MIRVs can't change their trajectory that much…
I’ve read that ICBMs are very hard to spot after the initial boost phase. That being the case, if I was an ICBM designer, I’d add a cold gas thruster to the payload stage that allowed the target to be adjusted or fine tuned while it was out of the atmosphere in a stealthy way — even a delta-V of just 100 m/s adds up to 280km when the missile takes 45 minutes to arrive.
Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure we can. We have the capability to totally annihilate as much of North Korea as we need in order to prevent a counter attack. The question is if we are willing to do it, and kill millions of North Korean civilians. Trump is sure trying to convince the North Koreans that he is.
> We have the capability to annihilate as much of NK as we need to prevent a counterattack ...from North Korea If we start launching nukes in the direction of NK, how does China know it's going to stop in NK and not hit them? Do we call them up first? Then what do they say? Is it totally out of the question that China would panic (or reason?) and counterattack? NK doesn't exist in a vacuum, and in fact NK wouldn't ex…
The US wouldn't launch ICBMs at NK. They would be dropped from bombers or launched from subs/ships.
Most likely bombers though, which is what all of the saber rattling in the news with B52s/B1s has been about.
Also, China has a defense treaty with NK and has very publicly stated that it will honor its treaty unless NK strikes first.
Personally, I don't think nuking North Korea would even be an effective use of resources. With modern military precision bombing I'd say it's serious overkill unless you want to destroy something like an entire carrier strike group or deliberately cause loss of civilian life.
Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> The US is more than capable of launching a preemptive strike against NK without Seoul being hit nearly as hard as one would think. North Korea doesn't have to do any hitting. If the US nukes the North, the South will take the fallout full in the face.
The US doesn't need a nuclear strike, the fixed artillery installations can be hit with cruise missiles and air strikes, Pyongyang can be levelled with conventional bombing. People also overestimate the amount of fallout from modern nuclear weapons, it won't be a picnic site anytime soon but it's not going to turn into a Fall out game either. Nuking the DMZ isn't going to happen unless it's to stop a flood of 200 mil…
> People also overestimate the amount of fallout from modern nuclear weapons
If those people include the South Koreans, you still have a problem. Some estimates I’ve heard say more Americans were killed by heart attacks caused by the increase in blood pressure caused by the fear of terrorism after 9/11 than by actual terrorism. Likewise, if just 10% of Seoul flees in fear of radiation, I’d expect many dead just from the running-away part.
Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not saying the hypothesis you put forward is wrong but I've heard a very convincing complementary one: Kim's goals are: 1. Survival of the Kim leadership 2. Reunification of Korea To achieve the latter (and also the prior), he needs to remove the US from intervening in any conflict on the Korean peninsula. If he had a credible threat to any major US city, then the US would have to weight the freedom of S. Korea vs. t…
Kim has a substantial problem in that premise, regarding China. At this point we have to assume North Korea will soon have dozens of nuclear weapons (basically as many as they can manage to make), and in a few years that they'll have dozens capable of being placed on an ICBM that can hit most US cities. Their progress has accelerated dramatically, that will probably make such numbers very feasible. Now, following the…
I think "yes, prime minister" put it best:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2n916d
It never makes sense to use nuclear weapons. My favourite thing about the nuclear chain of command is how many humans are involved.
Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We brought our forces home after WWII We brought some of them home. The US still had a quarter of a million troops in Germany in the late 1980s. In the 1950s, there were still 300,000 to 400,000 across all of Europe (eg 50,000 in the UK in the mid to late 1950s).
That's not but about a sixth of what the tank-heavy Red Army had at the time - a sixth which in a new war would have no hope of timely reinforcement, because of the aforementioned ocean. A nuclear deterrent was still seen as valuable, even necessary, and I think not wrongly so.
Some of the NATO plans for a Soviet attack were pretty crazy. They had plans where they would not start any real defensive action until the enemy reached the Rhine, hoping to trade almost all of West Germany for time so that US reinforcements could cross the Atlantic and deploy.
Major bridges and railway lines in Germany were designed with ways to block or destroy them to deny then to the enemy. Even the smaller roads near the border had holes in them for explosive charges (sometimes allegedly even pre-placed to save time). I grew up at the Czech border and have seen these. All of this was done to slow any invasion force that might enter the country from the east. After the fall of the iron curtain all of this was removed.
Also, Germany until 1990 was hardly in a political position to deny its western Allies the stationing of more troops if they had really wanted. Formally, provisions from the WW2 surrender were still in place that would have allowed the disbanding of the West German government and placement under allied control (this finally ended with the 2 plus 4 treaties).
Thankfully, the defense plan never needed to be tested, so there is no telling if it would have worked.