Threat from the DPRK (North Korea)

[Warren Dew]

(10-09-2017, 08:56 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Well, I admit, NK has an even worse leader. Whether he has any kind of perspective is debatable, at least.

I see you got there finally.

Quote:NK's nuclear capacity is not large enough to launch several weapons that quickly. I doubt they have the GDP to ever even approach the capacity of the USA or Russia. They don't even have one such missile yet.

Their GDP is sufficient to field a missile force comparable to the US or Russia.

Our GDP is sufficient to field a missile force 100 times as big as what we have.

It's a matter of priorities, not just GDP.  North Korea prioritizes their military much higher than we do ours.

Quote:If your ideas about test launches is correct though, doesn't that make my point about the Cold War, that a defense system gives the enemy ideas about how to get past them? Still, a 90% success rate would reduce the threat.

Agreed that SDI was never going to defend against the Soviets.  At most it could have tipped the balance of power in a counterforce war.  But it was possible to see even then that proliferation was eventually going to be a problem.

Quote:The USA has much better detection systems than the NK, so what you said about NK's ability to detect our launch, certainly applies to the USA. The speed of our response would wipe them out before they could launch any more

No matter how good your detection systems, the missile still take an hour to get to their target.  That's the physics of orbital mechanics.