AFAICT we know they have blown up stationary nukes and shot out inert ballistic missiles.
Lets put miniaturization aside and focus on another aspects, which i judge will be more critical.
The warhead must survive mechanical stress of launch and reentry, and thermal stress at reentry. The question is: can it be designed only with computers and public knowledge? They could build small hypersonic wind tunnel to collect data and simulate the rest.
For the interested: “Arms Control Wonk” podcast and blog with Jeffery Lewis and Aaron Stein are good resources.
They could almost certainly detonate a nuclear weapon in Korea or Japan. I’d put even odds on a strike on Guam, but probably not quite capable of hitting Western US.
Are you sure? Didn't they also detonate a buncha TNT to make it look like a nuke blast once?
(A weird thing to lie about.)
Having the world believe you have nukes is nearly as valuable as actually having them.
Not if you don’t have even a single aircraft carrier dude.
You’ll just get a lot of innocent people hurt in a rightful and overwhelming second strike.
Edit: hit send early - my bad… this isn’t Reddit :-)
The wiki article has a good rundown of the evidence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_North_Korean_nuclear_te...
The main issue is that, even without nuclear weapons, North Korea has enough conventional arms, including chemical weapons, to cause horrific damage to South Korea. Seoul's entire urban area is within artillery range of the DMZ. I've seen estimates of varying credibility but most experts speak of hundreds of thousands of deaths on the first day of shelling, if a full-scale war broke out on the Korean peninsula.
NK is no longer part of NPT. Would not this war be illegal? How does it correspond with "we are the nation of laws"?
>"I would expect China to stand back"
And what if it does not?
> How does it correspond with "we are the nation of laws"?
It does not. The United States government rejects the idea it is restricted by international law on these matters.
As for South Korea, it can argue it's an internal domestic matter.
I know this much. My question was largely rhetorical.
There are treaties, not laws, and no body to actually enforce laws, it’s just diplomacy. General practices are agreed upon but they’re basically just loose agreements.
Are there not alternative policies that would work a little better? North Korea just seems like a cornered badger and will continue to act like one. If you "opened" up the country by reducing some sanctions, it seems they'd have to adapt to be more civilized. These are more questions than statements.
* It collapses on its own or there's an internal revolution or coup. This would be a mess though because of the whole China, Russia, South Korea claims probably.
* It does something drastic and attacks and then gets invaded. That also seems a mess because now it's China, Russia, South Korea, and the U.S. and maybe Japan, depending on who it attacks.
One might draw parallel with Ukraine, which is fair, but turns out it wasn't USA the untrustworthy party to the agreement, and they didn't get a defensive alliance out of it, which showed to be a necessity and raises the bar considerably
Neither the Iraq nor Ukraine conflicts would have happened if they were nuclear states.
An armed society is a polite society, or so I've been told many, many times.
If the US government really wanted to stop this, it could offer a good faith deal for disarmament involving some kind of reduction of sanctions or normalization of relations.
Instead US politicians prefer to hypocritically hand-wring about other countries' nuclear development while maintaining a massive nuclear arsenal to threaten every other country, and while invading or bombing other countries on a regular basis. These are the actions that cause states to feel threatened enough to pour enormous resources into nuclear weapons development.
Oh right, it's the dictatorial megalomaniacs that spew anti western rethoric as distraction for their masses, that who.
Truly evil, these USA are.
Also, you completely ignored the part about the US practicing invading the country every year. Apparently that doesn't constitute a threat?
And I don't coun't that many bullshit wars. The second invasion of Iraq, maybe Afghanistan. Lybia was, but it was France's bullshit war.
Besides Usa has many allies and responsabilities, it's not that strange having them involved in many conflicts.
It's "practicing invading North Korea" in the same sense North Korea's missile tests are "practicing dropping nukes on America." It's a war practice, all options are on the table, with the hope that they won't be necessary.
South Korea and the US had canceled the yearly joint exercise in 2019, hoping for a better relation with North Korea. It didn't work out - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_Korean_missile_t...
The exercise resumed in 2022.
The context here is extremely important. All of this (the invasion exercises, the missile tests, the Korean War) have taken place in the Korean peninsula. None of it has threatened the US homeland in a meaningful way.
In addition, the exercises have been going on since 1997. That's a long time before any missile tests were conducted. If the DPRK (North Korea's name for its state) had been testing nukes from Cuba in 1997 I'd feel differently. But note that even dropping live bombs on other countries is something the US gets to do without starting a war because the US military is so powerful. Very few other countries operate that way and North Korea certainly isn't one of them.
(Of course, the official North Korean propaganda is that South Korea doesn't matter, because it's merely a colony of Imperialist America, to be liberated by our brave northern brothers. How nice of them.)
> the exercises have been going on since 1997.
North Korea has been caught developing nuclear weapons as early as 1992, which led to it threatening to withdraw from NPT in 1993. It's a shitty situation with decades of history, and you could easily find plenty of things to blame on both sides. But interpreting it as the US threatening to invade NK is a pretty biased take.
So negotiating with them has been dicey. Especially since they have figured out that "If we do this thing the west doesn't like, we can go to the negotiating table and get them to send us food."
I do want to point out that the war never ended in 1953 - there was just an armistice signed, so technically North and South Korea are still belligerents.
So far as the DPRK leadership acting rationally - by their standards, they are. From talking with people who have visited there - the North Koreans have a world view that is substantially different from everyone else on the planet.