That seems incredibly optimistic. It seems to me that one of the possible, even likely, outcomes is a nuclear exchange starting with an NK thermonuclear weapon obliterating a major US city (LA instead of a naval base in Hawaii), followed by the decapitation you reference, followed by a PRC nuclear response, followed by what “Wargames” referred to as Global Thermonuclear War.
PRC can either fire and also lose a few cities, or not fire and be ignored.
MAD works because everyone knows that starting or joining a nuclear firefight is literally suicide. What would compel them to fire if they're clearly not being targeted?
And, of course, for cases of a war starting because of a false belief that they were about to be attacked there is the real life case of Able Archer 83:
> What would compel them to fire if they're clearly not being targeted?
A thinking that they can win: Tojikistan, Karabag, Transnistria, Georgia, Donbas, Crimea, Syria, Libya — all set a very damning precedent of the West conceding to use of force.
These are cases where the West did _not_ want to escalate. Too small and at the end of the day the only consequences for the West are the refugees and terrorism. Both can be "handled" by closing borders and turning up the surveillance state.
If China decides to shoot back, all bets are off. It would be exactly the error the Japanese made when they attacked Pearl Harbor and thought they can get away with it. That would directly affect the West and our leaders could not say anymore "will be fine, we're taking the high road here" unless they want to be lynched by a mob.
There's a huge difference between a village in the middle of nowhere in a country Westerners don't care about and a major city in a developed country being attacked. And I say that as someone from about 500 km away from Transnistria, not as a Westerner.
Also everyone knows that the US is both highly militaristic and highly jingoistic.
> Also everyone knows that the US is both highly militaristic and highly jingoistic.
That was certainly true up through the early 2000s, but this stereotype is by now out of date. On the left, America is self-loathing, and on the right it's become quite isolationist.
i don't think so, a clear military attack on American soil by a foreign nation would mean lines around the block at local military recruitment offices in every city/town across the nation. Congress would have a full declaration of war signed in an hour.
Terrorist attacks like 9/11 leave doubt about who to go after and at what scale to retaliate but a clear attack on a city by a foreign state as an act of war is a different thing. Gloves would come off and the complete full force of every resource ( military, political, economic, etc ) would be brought to bear.
It depends on the specifics, of course. If a specific country directly attacked the US, of course I'd expect (and even demand) a military response. But these days, I wouldn't expect a non-state's terrorist attack to lead to the sort of misguided, ill-informed adventurism that ultimately led us to invade Iraq.
This definitely goes in the TIL pile. I'm fairly well traveled
E.g. I've visited most of the Balkans, Sarajevo, Mostar, but I had not heard of Transnistria.
Oh, China absolutely wants to control/exert influence in NK, I just don't see them being at all interested in military takeover of the country -- except perhaps if it falls into the "wrong" hands, in which case they might invade to install a compliant regime and then GTFO (see also: Korean War).
Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria .. all set a very damning precedent of the West not quite having the terror-liberating forces it proclaims to have.
>A thinking that they can win
The only way to talk about war is to be prepared to understand 'the other side' of your argument. In this case, you're setting yourself up to have to answer the question: in the 21st century, which nation state has started the most wars, committed violent hostilities, and murdered innocent citizens at massive scales, the most?
> PRC can either fire and also lose a few cities, or not fire and be ignored.
That's unlikely to be the scenario. The big problem for China is that they're responsible for the current North Korea regime existing. China has been directly, intentionally propping up and protecting North Korea from day one. The American people will not find it acceptable to exchange Pyongyang for Los Angeles or New York, much less trade several of North Korea's cities for several major US cities.
The American public would demand a nuclear strike against China in retaliation, a more equitable outcome - Shanghai for Los Angeles, Beijing for New York - for those ultimately responsible for what North Korea is today.
That's where hundreds of millions of people could die from a North Korean strike. It's why China should have never enabled and tolerated the Kim regime in the first place, and now it's too late to fix that historic blunder. Any nuclear strike from North Korea will likely result in a nuclear strike against China.
This is equivalent to the Israeli Samson option (which is why you don't want Iran getting nukes).
If the US goes down - eg loses its top 30 cities - why shouldn't it take every Chinese and Russian city with it? Try convincing the American public to not want revenge against anyone that has ever assisted North Korea.
Fortunately the public doesn't have unmoderated access to ICBMs.
It's also notable that the USA has also tolerated the Kim regime, because it gives them an excuse to be present in force in South Korea. It's not like the CIA couldn't have the Kims removed if they put some effort into it. PRC would have to pretend to be angry about it, but it would also get them out of the awkward situation.
Iranian assassination, and he's backing a huge proxy war in Yemen that has been devastating. I'm sure the "Made in the USA" bomb fragments on the ground that blew up Yemeni children will be attributed only to the Saudis and not the US.
Trump is culpable for much, but technically the conflict in Yemen started before he was president. The claim above still seems accurate, though I think we can safely say such a claim is damning with faint praise.
I'm referring to the Trump-ordered assassination of Qasem Soleimani. He was Iran's equivalent of the Secretary of Defense, and also a folk-hero to Iranians. Soleimani was assassinated by US drone strike in January 2020.
Iran responded with a carefully-targeted retaliation - a small missile strike against an unused/unmaintained US military installation in Iraq. There were no casualties.
Iran chose a target with low strategic value and no personnel present. Just enough of a strike that they could sell it as retaliation, but not enough of a strike to escalate into a full war.
I won't pretend to know if the assassination was warranted or necessary. But it's easily something that Iran could have used to justify a war.
> The American public would demand a nuclear strike against China in retaliation
This... doesn't seem likely.
> If the US goes down - eg loses its top 30 cities - why shouldn't it take every Chinese and Russian city with it? Try convincing the American public to not want revenge against anyone that has ever assisted North Korea.
Okay, I see where you're coming from, but this was not the scenario being discussed. The scenario presented was "NK lobs a single nuke at Los Angeles." The expected response is closer to "US decapitates NK before they can fire any more, everybody shits their pants, but no additional nukes are fired."
Decapitating NK in one fell swoop might be possible... decapitating China is highly unlikely. The US should therefore not initiate firing nukes at China unless a substantial number of US cities have already been hit, because doing so would all but guarantee that those cities would be hit by China in the next volley.
The US should therefore not initiate firing nukes at China unless a substantial number of US cities have already been hit, because doing so would all but guarantee that those cities would be hit by China in the next volley.
A ballistic launch towards NK looks an awful lot like a ballistic launch towards China, is the problem there. Will China "wait and see" where it lands?
It would certainly be unnerving, but I would expect their command and control procedures to account for some amount of context.
In this case, the context would be:
"Holy shit guys, NK just launched a rocket that looks like it's headed for LA!"
[3 minutes later]
"And now the US just launched 14 rockets, and they might be headed for us, but they're probably headed for NK."
China's best option is to wait and see, because if they decide to fire, and were wrong about China being targeted, they'll see another round of launches three minutes after that one, and those will be headed for China.
They've played this all out. MAD really does work.
If NK launched a nuke against an American city, and the American president told the world "I am decapitating NK in response," I don't think China would look at a strike against NK as "Oh no but what if it's a strike against us secretly, let's start a nuclear war with America just to be sure."
China doesn't want to enter WWIII any more than the US does. And the US response to an NK attack is very predictable.
my thought too, if NK launched everyone would stand back and let the US extract its pound of flesh. However, I think any country who has every helped NK ( China, Russia, etc ) would be suffer in every way except militarily. Think being cutoff from US financial markets etc.
The US could setup a conventional non-nuclear response that takes Pyongyang off the map, probably within a few days. That would be the safer strategic option and the rest of the world would not criticize such a response, while a nuclear response would not be appreciated by many others.
The US could setup a conventional non-nuclear response that takes Pyongyang off the map, probably within a few days.
Any strike on NK has to decapitate it instantly, or the conventional artillery along the border will pound Seoul into rubble in the meantime. Ballpark figures are 10,000 pieces, some dug in, some mobile, each capable of firing 10kg high explosive and keeping it coming until their ammunition runs out. It's a hard problem for any military planner.
If the SK capital was on their south coast and it was only farmland within artillery range of the border than NK would be an easy problem to solve (obviously if that were the case NK would have developed other weapons to compensate). Notwithstanding China of course.
A conventional strike would thus have to be two-pronged: (1) overrunning the DMZ to neutralize the artillery and prevent a counterstrike, and (2) attack Pyongyang. Of course, this is probably the scenario war planners on both sides have analysed ad nauseam. Success is thus highly questionable. And if it takes long enough for China to intervene again, WW3 will come and scores will be settled.
Really a pity we don't have a space lift system that can launch 100 tons into LEO, figure 25 tons per 20 foot long tungsten rod (or DU). One could imagine a hundred of those things saturating the region beyond the DMZ pretty hard.
Is there any indication whatsoever that DPRK has, has developed, or even CAN develop, now or in the future, thermonuclear devices?
It’s my understanding that they have designed and produced only fission weapons. I’ve never heard a single piece of information ever that suggests that they can, could, or would produce a fusion bomb.
“possible, even likely” in the context of a DPRK fusion bomb, given what I have seen and read thus far, seems like complete fantasy to me. Do you know something I don’t?
Is it even possible to build a fusion bomb that's "low hundreds of kiloton"?
The first ever (and presumably smallest?) one the US ever did ("Ivy Mike") was two orders of magnitude larger than that (~10MT).
There is no question that the DPRK has fission weapons, but ojbyrne asserted a thermonuclear attack, which I have never seen any indication is within the present or predictable future capabilities of the DPRK.
Oh, hang on. It would appear the DPRK has actually made this claim, according to WP, but it seems to be disputed.
> Is it even possible to build a fusion bomb that's "low hundreds of kiloton"?
Yes, and in fact most thermonuclear devices nowadays are in that range as its more efficient than a smaller number of megaton range bombs. Eg the most common US warhead (fitted to Trident) is the 100 kiloton W76 and each Trident missile can carry 14 of them, each independently targeted.
> starting with an NK thermonuclear weapon obliterating a major US city
That doesn't seem smart at all. I think that a nuclear explosion on the ocean, right in front of a major city (NY, LA) but at safe distance, would be a better start. It provides the same amount of threat with no victims and no pressing need for blind retaliation.
But why would you do damage? Since NK could never possibly win a "damage" war with the US- disabling the US ability to retaliate or defend itself- the purpose of an attack by a country like NK can only be that of preventing further attacks or retaliations. And inflicting serious damage on the first shot is ensuring that such retaliation will happen.
What NK needs is to make clear that the cost of attacking it can be unsustainably high, while provoking the least possible response.
NK doesn't need to fire anywhere close to the US in order to do this. We're already watching them, and for the most part, they've already made it clear that attacking them might cost us a city or two.
Putting on a nuclear waterworks in front of Los Angeles would be psychotically risky, because the US would need to decide whether or not to return fire before the US target is known. "Vaguely near Los Angeles" might as well be Los Angeles because of measurement uncertainties, late-stage course corrections, and MIRVs.
As usual, the winning move is not to fire anything that might be construed as a nuke towards any of your enemies, unless you are prepared to die.
Most probably the US riposte will be in the air (and there's not recall capability) before the US can be sure that the target is the sea 10km from the major city and not the major city.
