Don retired from the Army in 1995, having served on four continents. He was an artillery forward observer in Korea, a battery commander, a brigade fire support coordinator, and howitzer-battalion operations officer in Germany, and operations officer for a Multiple-Launch Rocket System battalion in 18th Airborne Corps Artillery at Fort Bragg, NC. Don was also qualified as a nuclear and chemical targeting analyst and was trained in counterterrorism at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, N. C.
In 1986 Don attended the Defense Information School, from which he graduated first in his class, then served as chief of media relations for XVIII Airborne Corps and Fort Bragg, N. C. During the invasion of Panama in December 1989 (Operation Just Cause), he served on the Corps’ Battle Management Cell.
Assigned to the Pentagon in early 1990, Don served as the speech writer and personal public affairs officer to the Secretary of the Army until January 1991, when he was assigned to the U. S. Army Operations Center for the Gulf War.
After the return of forces to America, Don was assigned to be Director of Media Relations for the National Victory Parades in Washington, D. C. and New York City, coordinating directly with White House staff and more than 650 national and international news organizations.
Subsequently, he was a plans officer on the Army Staff until May 1993. His final Army assignment was as chief of public affairs, U. S. Army Criminal Investigation Command. Just before retiring, he served as a member of the Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation Task Force.
And JeffD:
JeffD is an internet gaming forum participant.
Hmmm, gee whiz, who seems more reliable to me? That’s a real puzzler.
That Fred Kaplan article is a little weird. It begins by blaming Bush, then proceeds to not blame bush anywhere in the half of the article that I read. It seems that it lays the blame on Clinton, congress and Bush for no giving NK a pair of promised light-water reactors.
Baby Jesus doesn’t really give a flying fuck about language, you ignorant cunt.
Or, hypocrisy is always an option…that works for a lot of people.
My own hypocrisies bear no particular relevance to the fact that you act like someone who has recently suffered severe head trauma.
While nuclear explosives can in principle be made with material containing somewhat less than 20 percent U-235, the amount of material required increases rapidly as the U-235 concentration falls below that level. (The critical mass for uranium with 20-percent U-235 surrounded by a 4-centimeter thick beryllium neutron reflector is over 400 kilograms; for uranium with 15-percent U-235, the corresponding figure is well over 1,000 kilograms.) In international practice, all uranium with a concentration of U-235 of 20 percent or more is referred to as “highly-enriched uranium” (HEU) and is subject to special safeguards measures. For fission explosives, nuclear-weapon designers prefer a U-235 fraction over 90 percent, and HEU in this concentration range is called “weapon-grade”.
The gun-type uranium bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima in August 1945 was about 10 feet long and 2.5 feet in diameter, weighed some 8,000 pounds, and contained about 60 kilograms of weapon-grade HEU; it yielded between 12 and 15 kilotons.
It subsequently proved possible to make nuclear weapons considerably smaller. Indeed, the United States deployed nuclear artillery shells for cannons as small as the 155 millimeter howitzer; that warhead cannot have exceeded 155 millimeters in diameter—about 6 inches. It is reported to have weighed about 100 pounds and to have had a yield around a tenth of a kiloton. The lightest nuclear weapon the United States ever deployed was the W54 warhead, which in its “Davy Crockett” version weighed about 50 pounds and reportedly had a yield in the range of a quarter of a kiloton.
The M-388 round used a version of the device. The Mk-54 weighed about 51 lb (23 kg), with a selectable yield of 10 or 20 tons (very close to the minimum practical size and yield for a fission warhead). The complete round weighed 76 lb (34.5 kg). It was 31 in. (78.7 cm) long with a diameter of 11 in. (28 cm) at its widest point; a subcaliber piston at the back of the shell was actually inserted into the launcher’s barrel for firing.
So from what I’m seeing here, yes North Korea could have set off a tiny nuke. But from what I’ve read as well, it’s damn hard to make one. Or they could have made one that just cooked off. Or they could have done it with conventional explosives.
Understand, as well, that only one cannon fired nuke was actually fired. And of course, we can’t know for sure that any of the numbers that are used here are exactly true. The things that I figure we have to wonder about are:
How much is still classified? (about the M-388) What was the purity of the NK uranium? And if they didn’t use uranium, but plutonium instead, why would they waste such a precious comodity on a test shot?
There seems to be an issue or two about whether the test was done in a small hole or a large cavern (either natural or man-made). As of this post no traces of radioactivity have been detected. This is, of course, by long range detection methods (satellites, border stations).
As well, if the hole/cavern was a soft earth area or buried in a softer strata, as opposed to solid rock, the seismological return might be smaller. Thus the data that discusses the yield of the bomb could be wrong by several decimal points.
In other words, it could have been a 10 kiloton explosion that seemed like a 2 kiloton explosion to seismographs. And if it was deep enough we might never see any radiation evidence.
If you want to go all paranoid (and I know nobody in P&R is like that) there is really nobody that knows what the NK’s set off but the NK’s.
Actually, given the nature of totalitarian regimes and the relationship of the PRC to PRNK, the PRC probably knows better than the PRNK what actually happened.
When I see the PRC suggest that only mild sanctions be levied against PRNK, I think three things:
The PRC is just negotiating for its own sake. Because, well, that’s what you do in diplomacy.
They’re negotiating for less because they know that this wasn’t the big deal the rest of the world thinks; either the test failed, wasn’t nuclear, or is unrepeatable.
As an unlikely alternative, PRC condones the idea of PRNK getting nukes. This possibility has been covered elsewhere and better by people smarter and more knowledgable than I.
SEOUL, South Korea — A defiant North Korea threatened more nuclear tests Wednesday and said impending sanctions would be considered an act of war as nervous neighbors raced to bolster defenses and impose punitive measures on Pyongyang.
In its first formal statement since Monday’s claimed atomic bomb test, Pyongyang hailed the blast as a success and warned that any act to penalize North Korea would be met with physical retaliation.
“If the U.S. keeps pestering us and increases pressure, we will regard it as a declaration of war and will take a series of physical corresponding measures,” the North’s Foreign Ministry warned in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. The statement did not specify what those measures would be.
It may be ( and more than likely is ) more posturing by NK, but that’s there’s some pretty strong words.
The US would wipe NK off the map. Even in a nuclear standoff it wouldn’t be MAD. What is the point of that, to make themselves look like crazy idiots? They think it might prevent people penalizing them with sanctions? lol
I’m not a professional diplomat, and do not understand their special language where words have hidden meanings unknown the rest of us. Nonetheless, this strikes me as a batshit insane on the part of the North Koreans (yeah, who would have guessed). They got their nukes (maybe), well played.
But telling a foreign power that may just be itching for a “justifiable” reason to bomb you into rubble that mere “sanctions” will cause a war is just nuts. It’s almost like you are intentionally setting up the scenario to be justifiably attacked in the eyes of the world.
Even in the current anti-U.S. world with respect to foreign relations, would any but the most oddball countries not back the U.S. and South Korea if North Korea started military action due to mere sanctions (or aggressive, non-military pressure)?
The more I think about it, the more I laugh at how badly NK’s government has fucked themselves. It’s like they want their country to be pre-emptively invaded and liberated. Will China even bother to bail them out in any way if that comes to pass? About all they could do is offer moral support without starting WW3. And I think they’re just about as fed up with their embarrassing retarded cousin as we are.
It’s SOP for North Korea. They escalate and play brinksmanship in the expectation that the great powers around them will back down in order to avoid a conflict.
Plus, even if the US did decide to nuke them off the map… they’d have to deal with the nearby countries who would then have to suffer from nuclear fallout.
Doesn’t matter if NK can retaliate or not. Launching nukes = bad.
The best course of action even if NK were to nuke a neighbour would absolutely not be nuclear reprisal.
I’m having the same thoughts; any large scale retaliation by the North would be met with a Afghan-style response where it’s more of a multi-nation/UN force that’ll be deployed. Thinking we’ll go into North Korea like we did in Iraq with a few close allies and us as the vast majority of troops would be kinda silly, as any “penalizing” would be from the UN. The UN votes on a resolution, passes it, and that resolution gets the South bombarded… well, it’s a UN problem now. We may be stretched thin, but such a hugely provocative act would pull in many member nations.
North Korea has issued many strong statements, but this one just strikes me as odd. Who knows what their plans are.
