They've put stuff in orbit before, so I'd wager they could hit the continental US, but probably without any accuracy beyond maybe picking a state.

They haven’t gotten anything to orbit with the weight of an atomic bomb with the proper shielding to handle re-entry.

Kwangmyŏngsŏng-4 was apparently 200Kg, which is actually just about enough.

>they’ve detonated >50kt nukes

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.)

> A weird thing to lie about.

Having the world believe you have nukes is nearly as valuable as actually having them.

More valuable, in any rational sense of the term. Having them without anyone believing that you have them is more or less useless. Their only purpose is deterrence (unless you have a death wish for your population, and there are easier methods available if that's your 'use case')

I believe that’s his point.

>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 :-)

Yes, there’s no doubt. They’ve tested multiple devices, several of them failed but the 2017 one didn’t. We know they bought the designs and materials from Pakistan, we’ve seen enough images of the process and equipment to know they were actively making progress, and we can measure the size of explosions via seismographs. We can measure the craters left behind via satellite images.

The wiki article has a good rundown of the evidence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_North_Korean_nuclear_te...

Wow they really put EVERYTHING on a wiki now. Thanks!