News from Norkiland
Back in September, I reported that the Norks had succeeded in an underground nuke test that yielded 20 to 30 kilotons, which is up to three times the explosive impact of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. The detonation generated a 5.3 seismic reading, per the USGS, and yes, a quake near Punggye-ri, the underground test site.
Subsequent to that, a high-profile North Korean official Thae Yong Ho defected to the South in London and has been supporting information filtering out of that not-so-secret gulag on the other side of the DMZ.
More disturbing news is coming out of North Korea now that the head of Norkiland’s secret police, Kim Won Hong, has been dismissed by Fatty Kim da T’ird, a/k/a ND:tBF. This was confirmed by South Korea’s Unification Ministry. ‘Dismissed’ is a polite word for prison candidate.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-kim-idUSKBN15I095
Well, Fatty Kim da T’ird does like to have people executed for not standing up straight at parades, so this is not really a surprise.
Perhaps we need to view Norkiland with a less jaundiced eye and instead, keep a weather eye on that hidebound bunch. The South may laugh at them but they haven’t asked us to leave yet, have they? No, they haven’t. In fact, they seemed to be happy to have SecDEF Mad Dog there for a visit a few weeks ago.
And we must not forget or sneer at their experiments with nuclear weapons, and the fact that they are seriously working to produce and launch missiles with nuclear warheads attached.
However, in the Norks’ one-sided race to get ICBM nukes on the launch pad, which requires enormous incentive to achieve, you have to start wondering what Kim Won Hong’s offenses actually were, and whether or not these purges and executions are doing less to scare people than they do to piss them off.
Revolutions against tyrants have been started with less incentive
Category: North Korea
I wonder if pudgy ‘lil Kim Jong Un aka NDtBF might suddenly trip, fall and hurt himself *COUGH!*, by accident? Let’s not forget that he had much of his late crazy Daddy’s inner circle executed to include his own Uncle who he had fed to hungry dogs!
No, not dogs. Uncle was executed with anti-aircraft artillery.
He had all those people executed because, according to some reports, they didn’t think he was as capable as his daddy and granddaddy.
This is the problem with the cult of personality: it only works for trash like the Kardashians.
You could be right, but I’m sure he had his Uncle executed via dogs and had one of his Generals executed via AA Machine Gun for nodding off during one of his speeches. Pudgy ‘lil Kim also had a former girlfriend/fiancé executed after he accused her of doing pr0n flicks.
was that the wife that’s been missing? or someone else? it’s hard to keep track of everyone he’s had offed
I have read somewhere that we should not fear communism.
Who said that, someone from UC Berzerkely?
(snerrrkkk!)
Did someone say “Don’t Fear the Commie”?
By the way, Poodle – does 2 plus 2 still equal 5, like it did in that early-1930s Soviet propaganda poster?
Boom.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!
Snowflake logic: 2 + 2 = 22
Speaking of the People’s Republic of Bezerkley… someone has the FBI asking questions about their participation in some extracurricular activity:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/02/07/uc-berkeley-staffer-under-investigation-for-participating-in-riot/
I am grimly amused at the folks who do not understand how vulnerable the average American is to the aftermath of EMP bombs. Try to imagine ALL the electronics not working…and think how fast relief would happen. I believe the estimates are that even with little bombs it would only take a handful to cripple us – the military equipment might work but as they say, the average American has only a few meals’ thick veneer of civilization.
You could easily be right, I once had a college ROTC Instructor who theorized the same thing and that was in the mid-eighties. His theory was that “The Evil Empire” that existed then could easily have paralyzed everyone’s electronics via a 5 or 6 kiloton airburst high enough to not hurt anyone but with an EMP strong enough to KO electronics.
Believe “One Second After” postulated at about 35 miles up could effectively wipe out the entire continental US. Don’t know if the math works but from 35 miles up I doubt there would be more than some flashblindness in people who happened to be looking directly at one.
Starfish Prime test in 1962 affected the streetlights, set off alarms and damaged a microwave relay site in Hawaii – almost 900 miles away from the detonation point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
Hmm… Obama was born in 1961. Think maybe it affected his brain, at such a tender age?
Actually, the warhead needed for EMP-Zorch of the lower 48 would be gigantic, and would need to be lofted very high over the middle of the USA to work. Basically, only the USA, Russia, and China have ever built such massive multi-megaton warheads. Of those, only the US and Russia have flown large enough booster to lob them to the required altitude and distance. Sure. You can create an EMP zorch with a low-yield warhead (20kt) at low altitude (50 miles), but the coverage is tiny and the relative zorch energy is miniscule compared with the Tisa Bomba it takes to zap 90% of everything. The warhead/rocket combo for a one-shot zorch-all is a whole order of engineering magnitude, or three, beyond the likely culprits like the Norks or MadMullahs. With what they likely have, they would need multiple simultaneous launches, from very close in, to bracket most of the lower 48. They will miss most of the militarily essential stuff, so they die vaporized and irradiated. We replace a bunch of expensive stuff, but they still can generate the ultra-high energy levels needed to fry most items. EMP is not magic, and the well-published doom-sayers tend to leave out the minor details of what it actually takes, handwaving over it to publish their “doomsday” book. An EMP attack is -incapable- of decapitating or disabling our strategic weapons. The Ohio class subs out there, wherever, all survive intact, 24 launchers per boat and 3+ MIRV warheads per launcher. One boat can gut any nation on earth. One boat can reduce the smaller ones to irradiated wastelands. So no one in their right mind would even think of doing something so fatally -dumb-. Some lunatic despot might think to do so, especially if they also assume they might use deniable means. Wrong again. The fissilestuff is as unique as fingerprints, so we would in very short order back-trace to the origin, then bounce the rad-rubble as a warning to the rest of the world. Could it make life messy? Sure. Take us all the way out? Not a chance. No practical… Read more »
All it took to shut down an electric grid in Canada and block short wave radio in 1989 was a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun. It took less than two minutes.
We haven’t had one of those nastier outbursts from the Sun in a while. I think there were some big ones in the early 2000s that just barely missed the Earth. The most recent CME was in 2015.
In 1859, a CME set fire to the newly-installed telegraph network because the lines were non-insulated copper wires, which transferred the energy directly to the telegraph stations on railroad lines.
All of that, including damaging electronic toys, would do the same thing as a nuclear EMP. I wonder what it would do to an electric car like the Tesla.
According to a Tow Truck Driver I talked to a few weeks ago, it doesn’t take much to KO a Tesla car.
The Tsar Bomba (RDS-220) was the biggest detonation ever at 57 megatons, bigger than Castle Bravo (USA) at 15 megatons. Tsar Bomba was detonated in the Arctic Circle in October 1961. I don’t recall any loss of radio programming or TV interference, which would have been obvious since all TV and radio programming back in them there good ol’ days were transmitted by radio and TV stations from towers.
However, there was one day at the very end of October or beginning of November when I was walking over to my high school and this strong wind came up out of nowhere. It was extremely warm for that time of year, in the 80s.
Since nothing was ever said about above-ground Soviet testing, it might be a stretch to think that it was part of the shock wave from that big nuke, but still….
In-atmosphere, the warhead generates the usual flash/heat/blast/rads/etc. EMP of a low-altitude airburst is extremely local and low-power.
Out-of-atmosphere (exo-atmospheric) the physics of the blast are entirely different. Basically, the fireball is developed in vacuum, fully, then slams into the atmosphere, generating phenomenal electromagnetic energy in the right frequency range to zorch electronics and long-wire electrical systems.
Tsar Bomba at surface or even 10,000 feet is a fireball and mega-blast, and hardly any zorch. At 250 miles altitude, it is a continental EMP with no shockwave at ground level.
The EMP events of the “atmospheric” testing era were all extreme-altitude or exo-atmospheric tests.
You mentioned Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) events. The energy delivered is different, our magnetic field acts as a deflector shield, to some extent (until it doesn’t), and the small CMEs are bigger than all nukes ever exploded, together. The one in the 19th century was the largest one ever observed, and would trash quite a bit of our stuff, using slightly different physics to generate the zorch. (EMP is a direct energy transfer from the fireball, EM versus the mass/particle surge from CME. EMP is also a light-speed effect versus the much slower CME particle storm.
In really crude terms, the EMP is a radio-beam, and the CME is a particle-beam.
But nature has us beat, bigtime, in scale. Four 25MT warheads way up high -might- get 50-75% or sensitive systems. A “Carrington event” CME like one in the 19th century puts us back in the -early- 19th.
ouch.
I used to work for a firm that made radiation-hardened processors for space use, etc. CME/EMP/SpaceRads all have related damaging effects on microchips. (Oversimplified, but it works for conversational purposes.)
I’m wondering if there was jealousy involved?
Was NDtBF jealous of Won Hong’s “equipment”?
Not going there, no matter how much I want to.
No, I think it had more to do with cooking up charges against someone who thinks Fatty Kim da T’ird is a dink instead of the real deal. Most of the higher-ups in the Nork regime appear to be Kim Jong-Il’s generation, and unless I’m mistaking the purges going on, they think Junior doesn’t measure up.
I don’t know about Won Hong, but apparently Asian porn actors Hung Lo and Long Wang have not been seen in months… 😀
What about Long Luc Dong?
WRT nukes, I think it should be pointed out that merely constructing a crude fission bomb is not particularly difficult from a technical perspective (the most difficult part being the enrichment of uranium and/or the reprocessing of uranium into plutonium for the bomb core.)
OTOH, making a two-stage (thermonuclear) weapon that is (a) small enough to fit in the nosecone of a missile (b) rugged enough to withstand launch, flight and re-entry in an ICBM (c) mounted on an ICBM that is reliable and accurate enough not to disintegrate in flight and to land within a decent CEP of its target is at least another order of magnitude more difficult.
It took the US, with all its industrial might, the better part of a decade to get all of that worked out. Now it’s true that once that solution has been found it can be replicated, but North Korea doesn’t have even a fraction of the industrial resources that the US had during the height of the nuclear arms race.
Understand I’m not saying the NorKs are a paper target, but I’m saying that what NDtBF WANTS to do and what his broke-dick country has the ABILITY to do are very, very far apart.
So it’s probably a little early to start digging that fallout shelter or practicing your duck-and-cover drills.
I don’t think we should just discount what they’re doing now. They’re learning as they go, just like we did. They may be having trouble getting any long range missile to do more than fizzle out and fall into the Pacific, but we had the same issues ourselves during the Cold War, and before that, Hitler’s engineers had the same problem with the V2 and the V1, but once the wrinkles were worked out, those machines delivered.
Well, the first time one of their nukes goes off outside their borders, that’s pretty much the finish.
The first time any Nork Nuke (see what I did there?) goes off above ground, that may be the end of it for them, period. It won’t make the Chinese happy, either.
As an aside, Iran had a missile set up for launch a few days ago, and then took it down. I don’t have anything other than that news blurb, and a couple of satellite images.
EDIT: First sentence of paragraph 4 should read “Paper TIGER” not “Target.” 😉
I actually liked “paper target”!
As far as the North Korean nuclear tests go, a quick Wiki search reveals that the largest such test yielded between 20 and 30 kt. As PH2 pointed out, that’s roughly 1.5 times the yield of the Nagasaki “fat man” bomb and the Trinity explosion (both Trinity and Nagasaki used a more efficient implosion design, while the “Little Boy” used on Hiroshima used a simpler, but much less efficient “gun” design and only yielded about 10 – 13 kt.)
The NorKs claimed one of their explosions was of a dual-stage (thermonuclear) weapon but given the low yield, that may be questionable.
By contrast, the US B61 aerial bomb, per Wikipedia, has a variable yield of up to 360 kt and the W87 warhead that is on the Minuteman III is capable of yields up to 475kt.
Engineering note: the weapons require high-precision electronic doo-hickeys that do not tend to survive long around strong radiation and neutron sources. The tritium used as a neutron-source “booster” decays quickly, and the decay-product is a powerful neutron absorber, exactly the wrong thing to have in ones warhead.
You can spend a decade or two trying to figure out how to turn energy around corners to use it for that second stage, and never figure out how to keep all that energetic hellstuff from a) decaying into no-boomium and b) frying the make-it-boom electronics.
Billion dollar warheads with a shelf life of less than a year are kinda not what you need to impress the other nuclear neighbors.
The Norks and NDtBF are like Peter ” Hurricane” McNeely, the bum who got thrown in with Mike Tyson.
They don’t have the slimmest chance of winning, but they don’t realize that.
If they have a Nuke they can go out with a bang though.