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North Korea's Satellite Tumbling In Orbit
schwit1 writes: U.S. Defense officials stated Tuesday that the satellite that North Korea launched on Sunday is now tumbling in orbit and is useless. Do not take comfort from this failure. North Korea has demonstrated that it can put payloads in orbit. From this achievement it is a very short leap to aiming those payloads to impact any continent on Earth. They might not be able to aim that impact very accurately, but if you want to ignite an atomic bomb somewhere, you don't have to be very accurate.
Really? Is the story writer a nuclear arms specialist or is this movie-knowledge?
for nuclear weapons with than ten kilotons yield of course extreme accuracy is needed if targeting something a third the world a way, what a stupid thing to write. Do you get your ideas about a nuclear weapon can do from entertainment media?
At the moment, for people in the USA and Europe, NK is just an annoying abstract threat. Nobody wants to go start anything there because they could probably take out Seoul and parts of Japan quite easily, so it is better to just monitor the situation and leave them alone.
The main reason they get left alone is because of China. China protects NK even when they get completely out of pocket for reasons that are only vaguely comprehensible to us. Honestly if China wasn't involved I think NK would have been curb stomped by either the US or one of their neighbors some time ago. China props up the NK regime apparently primarily because they don't want to deal with the humanitarian crisis that would follow if the regime toppled. They also apparently don't want a unified and modern Korea with a border on China for strategic reasons.
Having said that, the guy sounds like a complete crackpot, so maybe he is just bored.
North Korea is on their third generation of crackpot absolute dictator. Hell, technically the Korean War never actually ended. There was an armistice but never an actual peace treaty.
Note to the new owners of Slashdot: this here conversation is precisely the sort of rare case where you should actually get involved (where the person or people involved don't care if they get modded down to zero and will just keep popping back up with more angry, offtopic rants in whatever thread they feel like)
We should start dealing in those black-market beagles.
I really, really doubt the leaders actually think it is worth dropping a single missile or two on the US, and expect that there would not be massive retaliation literally destroying their country. The US would not sit back after any kind of attack and reconsider, it would be full speed ahead.
Instead, what they want is the threat that they could let loose with several missiles if we were to invade them, and it would be difficult to stop them once in the air. That scares the US populace, and makes them think twice about coming and attacking them on the first place. That is why they make such a big show of it all, to make sure we know they have a weapon they could use against us. That, after all, is really the whole premise of nuclear weapons at this point.
My point was to correct the possible perception you or anyone else has about "tiny" nukes being something the DPRK has, or would be able to use in any offensive capability. Your casual use of the technology has the potential of inflate the fear mongering, especially next statements about "nuclear or thermonuclear warheads" and lack of mention of "cost" for any of those things. The 3rd world economy of the DPRK, and tyrannical government, mean that they do not have the budge or manpower for any meaningful development of WMDs like nukes.
In your eagerness to stop the fear mongering you badly understate North Korea's capability. Sure, they can barely feed their people. 20 years ago guys like you declared the same things, that the North's economy and tyranny made scientific accomplishments like nukes and rockets impossible. Since then they've detonated nukes(plural) and launched satellites(plural again). I'm not sure where you've set the bar for 'meaningful' but the North has made succeeded in building nuclear weapons and launching rockets around the world. Refining and improving that is well within their ability, they just need the time. I can only interpret your level of meaningful to mean that they can't reasonably develop a large enough arsenal to match existing nuclear powers. Given how brutal, cruel and tyrannical the Godkings inheriting North Korea are, that's small comfort.
The reality is that if Seoul wasn't housing 10million people within range of North Korean artillery, NATO probably would have removed the Kim dynasty generations ago. All the hand wringing is watching a very nasty family growing more and more powerful while we fear the cost of their removal too much to contemplate it.
Involved in what way? The people are modded down and I wouldn't have even seen the post if it weren't for curiosity on what you were talking about.
How would a policy of censorship or content deletion improve this situation without causing a negative issue at the same time? Lot of things on Slashdot could be changed for the better but quite frankly the moderation and lack of censorship have withstood the test of time.