The Maelstrom of Violence

[Warren Dew]

(09-04-2017, 02:15 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:

(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.

Just for the record, I am a nuclear engineer, or was until I switched to a faster growing industry.  This will become relevant later in this post.

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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.

Right.  That's what I refer to as "security forces" - the guys who hold the territory behind the front lines, if there are still front lines.

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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.

Valid points.  Their scientists also got training from the Soviet Union way back when.
That said, Russia and China were much larger economies with much larger populations from which to draw talented people.  They didn't start from scratch, either; the Soviet Union got help from spies in the US like Klaus Fuchs and others, and China got a lot of open help from the Soviet Union.

Quote: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.

That's what they say, but at the same time South Korea is lobbying the US against military action.  The only concrete actions anyone is taking are economic sanctions, and I'd bet there are plenty of nuclear wannabes that would be thrilled to give Kim what little foreign exchange he needs in return for help on setting up nuclear weapons programs.

Quote: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.

North Korea has kindly provided photographs of the warhead, just like they did with last September's test.  It took the better part of a year for the US government to admit what Kim had last time around, but it should have been obvious from the beginning.  Because of the classified nature of the Teller-Ulam geometry, it's not as obvious this time, but those of us who have independently figured out the Teller-Ulam geometry can figure it out.

What North Korea has is a two stage thermonuclear device.  It does not have the proper Teller-Ulam geometry, which is why the yield was only about 100kt rather than closer to the 1Mt range.  That said, most of its energy does come from fusion.

It is easily small enough to mount in a warhead.  The only question at this point is whether North Korea's warheads can survive reentry and whether they have the fusing to cause an explosion at an appropriate altitude.  Most likely they do, after all their missile tests and with their having had conventional missiles for decades now.

How do you think the path to war will proceed?  My concern is that war with North Korea isn't inevitable, and the McMasters of the world manage to convince Trump to accept North Korea as a nuclear power.  Then Iran gets back into the game, and Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and Myanmar and Venezuela and a bunch of others, and sooner or later someone uses one, and then people start using them regularly.  Eventually some regional nuclear war escalates into a global one, and whoever has the last nuke wins.  And I'm far from certain that will be us, since we have too many interests that will require our using them earlier than, say, Russia will have to.