The Maelstrom of Violence

[Kinser79]

(09-02-2017, 05:39 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: In real life, there is a three order of magnitude gap between the power of the largest conventional weapons and the power of the smallest nuclear weapons.  Heinlein envisioned nuclear weapons using subcritical masses to fill that gap, but technology hasn't developed them yet, and it's not clear the science will support its doing so.

I'm not a nuclear engineer so I'm not sure what science will and will not support.

Quote:In Heinlein's world, those weapons, and their portability, provided a role for what are essentially commandos in powered armor.  Without those weapons, I'm not sure such a role exists.  The only remaining use for infantry may be security forces for occupation.

Insider scuttlebutt is that infantry exoskeletons are already under development. These exoskeletons would act similarly to Heinlein's powered armor. As for the future of infantry, it will still be required. Fancy units may take ground but infantry holds it.

Quote:I would agree it will be people who control the nuclear weapons who determine what the state looks like, at least internally.  Assuming more realistically than Heinlein that nuclear weapons remain too large to destroy less than a city at a time, what does that look like?  So far, the state that has developed nuclear weapons most efficiently has been North Korea; is the future a world full of North Koreas?  That's what I worry about.

It should be noted that the DPRK was given both nuclear material and reactors by Bill Clinton to start with. That they've gone from some material and a functional reactor to H-bombs in 20 years speaks well of them, but they are not the most efficent state to have developed nuclear weapons. Russia and China both took 10 years and had to start from scratch. The US took a bit longer but was the first country to develop nukes.

I don't think we have to concern ourselves with a world of North Koreas--on the diplomatic fronts Russia is pulling civilians from Vladivostok and other Siberian Far East zones likely to be targeted. ROK and Japan have both said they will not tolerate the DPRK's actions, and China has also condemned the DPRK's recent test.

What is troubling though is that there are only three possiblities to explain the outcome of that test.
1. Kim isn't lying and they really do have the H-bomb
2. They made a bigger primative nuke in the 100 Kiloton range
3. They strung together a bunch of little primative nukes together to result in a 100kt test.

Option 1 is by far the worst. If they already have an H-bomb it is only a matter of time before they figure out how to put it on one of their ICBMs.

Option 2 means that they have managed to build a bomb 10 times the size of Little Boy.

Option 3 means that their nuclear arsenal, though still in the Fat Man/Little Boy stage is far larger than Military Intelligence expected.

Over all with North Korea I'm thinking war with them is pretty much inevitable.