Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed • Hacker News Board

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#171

Post by kbenson » Sat, Nov 04, 2017, 2:00 AM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #158

kbenson wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You seem to not understand exactly what the situation is even if NK would get an early warning say 10min it would not even get it past the guy who answers the first phone get alone to the military in the field. You seriously think high level Chinese diplomats don't have very quick communication access to Kim Jong-un? Why would you think that? I think it's very likely they have phone access to multiple aids of which…

Again you are missing the point NK has about “11,000” cannons pointed at Seoul these are fixed installations capable of being destroyed in a conventional preemptive strike before anyone gets the order to fire. By the time it would take China to detect a US attack, figure out what to do, deliver a message to the NK leadership and that message can be relayed to the field there won’t be many canons left. I think you don…

What you say is directly contradicted by the quoted words of a retired Major General in the article I previously cited. If you want to convince you me you are more knowledgeable or truthful than what was presented there, you'll need to cite some source. No offense, but when it comes to matters of military action, I'm going to take the word of someone with is or was relatively high in the military over a pseudo-anonymous internet persona unless evidence to the contrary is presented.

Here's the last paragraph: North Korean anti-aircraft weapons “are not all that impressive,” Scales said, “but there’s lots of them.” Could the North Korea guns be taken down? “Sure, over time,” he said. “But by the time we do that, the damage they’d inflict on Seoul would just be staggering.” They go into the reasons for that earlier.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#172

Post by nasredin » Sat, Nov 04, 2017, 2:08 AM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #158

kbenson wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You seem to not understand exactly what the situation is even if NK would get an early warning say 10min it would not even get it past the guy who answers the first phone get alone to the military in the field. You seriously think high level Chinese diplomats don't have very quick communication access to Kim Jong-un? Why would you think that? I think it's very likely they have phone access to multiple aids of which…

Again you are missing the point NK has about “11,000” cannons pointed at Seoul these are fixed installations capable of being destroyed in a conventional preemptive strike before anyone gets the order to fire. By the time it would take China to detect a US attack, figure out what to do, deliver a message to the NK leadership and that message can be relayed to the field there won’t be many canons left. I think you don…

There's also the dud rate that's a contributing factor here.

---

IIRC from a recent article regarding potential DPRK artillery salvo on Seoul the civilian casualties are in the tens of thousands.

South Korea kind of like Israel have bomb shelters everywhere. So DPRK only has a very limited number of salvos before people realize what's happening and seek cover (also counter-battery fire).

IMHO South Korea should have moved their capital a long time ago. They had 50+ years.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#173

Post by goialoq » Sat, Nov 04, 2017, 2:13 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #169

hangonhn wrote: post #105

Earlier 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…

What? Why would US bomb its main trading partner because NK bombed the US?

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#174

Post by adventured » Sat, Nov 04, 2017, 2:14 AM UTC

throwanem wrote: post #142

cat199 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the size of the Soviet Union, how far it is from the United States, the available spying and reconnaissance technology (no satellites, no stealth aircraft), and that the US was only four years out of World War II, I don't think there is any way the US could have made a creditable threat to use military force to stop the Russians. That whole 'massive military presence in western europe and asia minor' thing no…

Less so than you might think. We brought our forces home after WWII, which put them on the wrong side of the Atlantic to mount a defense against a Soviet invasion of Europe. That's actually where a lot of the early urgency originated in nuclear weapons development - not just to stay ahead of the Russkies, but to as quickly as possible mount a credible deterrent to precisely that potential Soviet war plan.

> 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).

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#175

Post by nasredin » Sat, Nov 04, 2017, 2:14 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #169

hangonhn wrote: post #105

Earlier 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…

And have a great weekend guys!

Adventured

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#176

Post by goialoq » Sat, Nov 04, 2017, 2:19 AM UTC

knappe wrote: post #135

valuearb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we been reckless? We've never had a serious accident. So maybe it's not luck, maybe there are a lot of controls that actually work well.

There are not a lot of controls that work really well. And a lot of the controls that do exist were fought for tooth and nail. That is the entire point of the book. :) For example, the locks in place at each Titan II facility all had exactly the same code (1111). And they were left unlocked. Regarding the accidents, here are a few examples: Thule Airbase crash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_c…

The other way to interpret these facts is that it takes a lot of work to actually detonate a nuclear weapon, so they are pretty safe by default and can handle abuse.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#177

Post by adventured » Sat, Nov 04, 2017, 2:22 AM UTC

goialoq wrote: post #173

adventured wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What? Why would US bomb its main trading partner because NK bombed the US?

That depends on the context.

If the US loses one city, that'll be an extreme tragedy that the US can absorb, while obliterating NK in response.

If the US loses its top dozen (or more) cities in a nuclear exchange with North Korea, there's no scenario under which the American public won't demand retribution against the enabling power/s that made that outcome possible. China would be guaranteed to get nuked as a consequence, given its responsibility for propping up and nurturing the Kim dynasty. If the US loses half of its civilization, it will respond exactly as one might expect.

You can't actually think the American public is going to sit on its collective hands and suffer its outcome quietly? That they'd be ok with trading NY, LA, SF, Seattle, Houston, Washington DC, et al. for Pyongyang and call it a day, while China goes on about its business, its civilization unscathed, like its actions over five decades didn't make the North Korean threat what it was. If it weren't for China, the US would have destroyed the Kim dynasty during the Korean War and unified Korea. They're responsible in every possible way for what North Korea is today, they propped them up and supported each regime with full understanding of what was going on in regards to the North's nuclear program across decades. Even if I don't agree with that premise, of holding China accountable in such a way, you can bet a just-been-nuked-40-times American public will, they'll ask a simple question: who has been North Korea's primary supporting ally?

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#178

Post by goialoq » Sat, Nov 04, 2017, 2:23 AM UTC

mantas wrote: post #102

clarkmoody wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And, currently, a handful of [governments] having them is the best way to ensure that. Until it isn't. But then it's too late to try anything different. > If all [governments] claim to destroy their nuclear bombs and never ever make a new one, would you trust all of them? I don't trust statements from governments, as a general rule.

> Until it isn't. But then it's too late to try anything different. We had that for a brief period of time. US was the only one with the nuclear bomb. Would they have used it on Japan if they had a chance to retaliate? > I don't trust statements from governments, as a general rule. I guess we agree governmental disarmament agreements wouldn't work..

> Would they have used it on Japan if they had a chance to retaliate?

Of course. Japan's army was bent on total annihilation. If Japan had a chance to retaliate, they would have struck first.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#179

Post by nasredin » Sat, Nov 04, 2017, 2:29 AM UTC

rangibaby wrote: post #132

rflrob wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one will detonate a thousand weapons unless they are declaring total war. Or if they believe (rightly or wrongly) that the other nuclear power has declared total war. There's been a number of false alarms that have been successfully ignored, but what if one of those false alarms came during the Cuban missile crisis or immediately after the invasion of Afghanistan?

> Cuban missile crisis US dropped depth charges on a USSR submarine and the latter thought WWIII had begun. Three people had to agree to use nuclear weapons and two did.

The "human" element in all of these computer-says-we-are-under-attack close calls is always a hopeless optimist with nerves of steel!

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#180

Post by MertsA » Sat, Nov 04, 2017, 2:34 AM UTC

PostOnce wrote: post #127

wildmusings wrote: post #122

Earlier 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…

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 though, you can target multiple locations, but they have to be in a couple hundred kilometers of each other.

Basically if there's an ICBM flying over China and it looks like it's going to hit NK, there's no way to kill all of that horizontal velocity and significantly change its trajectory.