There’s been no confirmation that what North Korea tested were nukes. Not one. Moreover, every reliable source says NK doesn’t have the capability to fire such a nuke in a missile, assuming they had one.
So why all the hubbub, bub? People are acting like a rain of deadly nukes will be fired from Pyongyang by tomorrow at the very latest. Yeah, David did slay Goliath, but c’mon, North Korea poses no genuine military threat against the US.
Look, their leader may be a bit off, but I’m sure he grasps that any serious attack by them against the US means massive retailiation. This isn’t, um, rocket science.
Maybe he wants a deterrent – just like what the US and USSR did during the Cold War.
I bet you many Arabs are jealous of North Korea. A nuclear bomb can at least avert a foreign invasion or a war of “liberation.” And it can’t be used for purposes of domestic oppression.
I’d say the hundreds of nukes missing from the former USSR and environs pose a vastly greater threat than does little bitty North Korea. But it is election time, got to whip up some war fever.
The country doing the loudest shouting against North Korea is the very same (and only) country that has used nukes against a civilian population. Why is that?
And what might be the difference between the Republicans and Democrats on North Korea?
Update: LA Times, front page article, first sentence “Kim Jong Il is neither insane nor stupid.”
I’d say their leader is a LOT off, but then so is ours.
It’s unusual not to find some leakage of radiation but not impossible. From what
I’ve read, the yield of the device was less than a kiloton, which suggests a
less-than-spectacular result, since a 1945-era bomb should yield around 15-20
kilotons, about 20 times what was measured.
That being said, it’s difficult to guess what the source was if not a nuclear
device. It’s conceivable that the North Koreans took advantage of a natural
earthquake to do their announcement, but I would expect that the waves produced
by a natural event are quite different from a nuke going off underground. It’s
extremely unlikely that it was caused by conventional explosives: 500 tons of
TNT? I don’t buy it.
Scientific proof is often less than complete, and we’d always like more answers,
like going to the test site and seeing what we could sniff out. Fat chance of
that happening anytime soon.