Can North Korea or Iran actually deploy the "Bomb"

[One_Life_To_Give]

Concidering that our (the US) early bombs were ten feet long and weighed 5 tons. Do they have the means to deliver it to a target?

[McKenzie]

1. with Russian or Chinese technology, probably yes

and they wouldn't need ICBM's anyway; theatre weapons would be much easier to launch.

[jayfish]

11. Actually Iran Has A Pretty Strong...

ballistic missile producing capacity. Granted, most of their stuff is reverse engineered and "improved" upon they still roll their own.

Jay

[TheFarseer]

2. I saw on TV that N Korea had missles that could hit Alaska n/t

[One_Life_To_Give]

5. But with how much payload?

Our Thor Missile used a warhead that only weighed 20% of what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs weighed. A Scud-B Missle was only designed for about a 2000lb warhead.

[TheFarseer]

6. don't remember, it was a while ago

[Botany]

3. Little off topic but .....

North Korea and nukes .......

Under Bill Clinton the N. Koreans liked Bill Richardson, of New Mexico, and wanted to do their arms negotiations through him. So Bill Clinton said, "fine." Richardson would have meetings with the Koreans in some obscure place in the Philippines. The Koreans would spend a day or so telling Bill R. that America sucks, is the devil, and so on. After that Bill R. would ask how much wheat and rice "they" needed. (N. Korea can not feed it's self) The Koreans would give him a # and he would tell somebody in D.C.. The N. Koreans would get their food and no nuclear bombs were made.

Under bush, his doctrine was no negotiations with N. Korean on such an informal level. And the results ....... Korea has the bomb and it will cost far more in dollars and hopefully not lives to get the situation under control.

Once again, nice work bush.

Stephanie :loveya: Miller

[Igel]

12. That's part of the usual story.

It continues, however.

N. Korea was also promised a nuclear reactor as well as oil and food in exchange for no development of plutonium-based weapons. Big Dog didn't fulfill that part of the bargain with all due alacrity. No US nuclear reactor, as far as I know, ever has been done on schedule, and there were various threats and manoeuvres along the way by N. Korea--Clinton's popularity if he had finished a nuclear reactor for a country that regularly threatened to make Seoul a sea of fire. Personally I think providing Kim with a on-going source of nuclear materials was a bad move, but being on the hook for their oil supply was, too. (Lose-lose is about the best I can see here.)

The N. Koreans moved ahead with uranium-based weapons for years under Clinton, while their own population was suffering enough malnutrition that there's a generation of N. Koreans something like 3-4 inches shorter than their South Korean counterparts. And dear Kim kept all their plutonium materials in mothballs, while working on bits of the infrastructure to speed things along once out of mothballs.

[benburch]

4. Easily.

They have submarines. They have balloons. All they need to do is sail upwind of a coastal city, and launch the bomb on a balloon. The Japanese did this in WW-II with firebombs, and caused massive damage in the form of forest fires. (At the time it was hushed up, but the records about this have recently been declassified.)

[One_Life_To_Give]

8. Are you assuming a "Thor Sized" warhead

which has a weight under 2000lbs? Obviously a bomb the size of Fat Man, 5 ft diameter, can't get thru the hatch of a sub.

[benburch]

10. Deck cargo.

Yes, it effects submerged performance, but a Korean sub spends 99% of its time on the surface.

[benburch]

13. Some links about Japanese Balloon-bombs of WW-II

http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/history/wwii/jbb.htm

http://www.axishistory.com/index.php?id=932

http://www.lib.msu.edu/unsworth/genhist/ww2/ww2st/fugo1.htm

[Richard Steele]

7. Undoubtedly YES

While our early bombs were huge affairs, they got smaller very quickly.

Within ten years, we were building nukes small enough to be fired by artillery pieces.
So, even 1950s-era designs would suit their purposes just fine.

And, common sense says that they wouldn't bother with any designs that didn't fit into their missile systems in the first place.

[ohkay]

9. Well, if not

They do have the ability to hit Japan, South Korea, Singapore etc. There really isn't any country that is a threat to the US in the traditional sense- no one has the capacity to threaten our continued existence.

We're doing a good enough job of that ourselves.
:mad:

[LSdemocrat]

14. North Korea has a missile that reportedly can hit Los Angeles

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3387

"The distance from the North Korean capital Pyongyang to Los Angeles is about 9500 kilometres. The CIA estimates the Taepodong-2's maximum range to be about 10,000 km. But, according to reports of South Korean military information, the two or three stage missile has a maximum range of 6700 km.

Jacoby said a Taepodong-2 could "target parts of the US with a nuclear weapon-sized payload in the two-stage configuration, and has the range to target all of North America if a third stage was used"."

[benburch]

15. I think a missile would be a great distraction for the real attack.

Were I Kim, I would never risk my nuclear warhead on an unproven missile. But I would fire a missile to divert everybody from whatever low-tech delivery method I chose.