>A helicopter assault on either of those cities would in the most optimistic scenario take hours of preparatory bombing, which would give a plenty of time for nuclear retaliation b
I have serious doubts they can manage anything more than a fizzle yield, but also only give them a one-in-three chance of a successful ballistic launch. It may be the case that they don't even have the preparatory work done, in which case hours isn't enough to launch, they'd need days/weeks. In any event, we're talking about one or two missiles only, and the Navy's ability to shoot those down in the midcourse/terminal phase is sufficient for such a small salvo.
If North Korea wanted to nuke us, they'd be better off handing the warhead off to some terrorist group to truck it across the Mexican border. Supposing their stuff is even small enough to smuggle.
>Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one.
But it doesn't have a China willing to rush in with 1 million PLA infantry. Which is really North Korea's only saving grace. Even if we got Kim out before they could mobilize, they'd be strutting and posturing for weeks, and there are any number of places they could fuck things up in retaliation. Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, they might even stir shit up with India. They could, one supposes, send a few divisions to Russia on loan, and enter into the Ukraine fray. And no clever strategy is going to counter that stuff. Some of this stuff they're already considering and only hesitant... a North Korea operation might goad them into working up the courage to try it.
One, nobody exactly allows independent observers so we only really get seismo readings from those tests. And they don't make alot of sense. Yields should've been higher for plutonium cores, it's not lightweight stuff. And I wouldn't put it past them to have somehow pulled a fast one to fool foreign intelligence agencies (though stockpiling thousands of tons of high explosives fake a successful nuclear test seems beyond farcical). Just seems wrong.
I don't know if the seismic signature from a 10 kiloton nuclear explosion underground is different from 10,000 tons of actual TNT exploded underground, but there was also radioactive gas evidence of North Korean testing:
The xenon isotopes involved have short half lives so if they were not produced by a nuclear explosion, they would have had to be released simultaneously by e.g. reprocessing a "hot" fresh batch of irradiated uranium at the same time as the underground explosion. This is not impossible, but it looks increasingly convoluted compared to an actual nuclear test.
Also, contra the upthread assertion that "Yields should've been higher for plutonium cores, it's not lightweight stuff," there is nothing about plutonium that drives high yield. The United States manufactured a large number of low yield (1.7 kiloton) plutonium warheads in the late 1950s:
If North Korea aimed to make missile-deliverable weapons from the beginning (which makes sense because they don't have heavy bombers like the Cold War powers did at the beginning of their arms race), it also makes sense that their weapons tests would be focused on validating compact/lightweight designs instead of trying for high yield.
I have serious doubts they can manage anything more than a fizzle yield, but also only give them a one-in-three chance of a successful ballistic launch. It may be the case that they don't even have the preparatory work done, in which case hours isn't enough to launch, they'd need days/weeks. In any event, we're talking about one or two missiles only, and the Navy's ability to shoot those down in the midcourse/terminal phase is sufficient for such a small salvo.
If North Korea wanted to nuke us, they'd be better off handing the warhead off to some terrorist group to truck it across the Mexican border. Supposing their stuff is even small enough to smuggle.
>Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one.
But it doesn't have a China willing to rush in with 1 million PLA infantry. Which is really North Korea's only saving grace. Even if we got Kim out before they could mobilize, they'd be strutting and posturing for weeks, and there are any number of places they could fuck things up in retaliation. Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, they might even stir shit up with India. They could, one supposes, send a few divisions to Russia on loan, and enter into the Ukraine fray. And no clever strategy is going to counter that stuff. Some of this stuff they're already considering and only hesitant... a North Korea operation might goad them into working up the courage to try it.