North Korea Says War With South Would Go Nuclear 608
A reader writes "According to reports from the Uriminzokkiri, the official website of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a war with South Korea would involve nuclear weapons, and '[will] not be limited to the Korean peninsula.' The article goes on, 'The Korean peninsula remains a region fraught with the greatest danger of war in the world. This is entirely attributable to the US pursuance of the policy of aggression against the DPRK (North Korea).'"
Re:This is tech news? (Score:5, Informative)
I think you forgot the "stuff that matters" part. I don't know about you, but a story about a real case scenario involving nuclear warfare seems pretty worthy of attention.
Re:I'm sure they're (Score:5, Informative)
I am not sure if this is true anymore or even if it were ever true; but I was told at the height of the cold war we had the capability to make the entire world uninhabitable in 8 seconds.
With what? Doctor Who technology? It takes tens of minutes just for ICBM-launched warheads to reach target. Bombers take hours. That's longer than eight seconds right there.
And we know how powerful nuclear bombs are. Even the 40,000 or so warheads at the height of the Cold War aren't that effective. I suppose we could seed all those bombs with cobalt and fire them off with intent to kill as many people as possible. That might drive to extinction any unshielded lifeforms above a few kilograms or with a longish lifespan. But anyone who is deep underwater or hangs out in a moderately deep underground cave for a few years, is probably going to survive.
Re:I'm sure they're (Score:5, Informative)
Not really.
8 seconds is too short a time frame. The delivery systems for nuclear weapons take longer than that to reach their targets. An ICBM launch from the continental US to what used to be the USSR or vice versa takes at least twenty to thirty minutes of flight time (though a launch from bases in Europe or a ballistic missile sub near the coast would obviously be faster than that). This doesn't factor in the time it takes to authorize a launch.
And making the entire world uninhabitable is pushing it. During the cold war, most of the targets for those missiles would have been in the northern hemisphere (North America and Eurasia); there would be survivors elsewhere in the world. This doesn't even get into the fact that fallout is not universally lethal, meaning that just because a given region has been contaminated it does not automatically follow that everyone there is doomed.
In a worst case scenario a full scale nuclear war could mean total human genocide, thought most of the deaths would occur weeks or months after the bombs fell due to radiation poisoning and starvation. A more likely scenario is a massive die-off and the complete collapse of civilization on a global level, as well as regional human extinction in the participating countries.
This is still terrifying obviously, but it's nowhere near the fictional Armageddon that many people associate with the words "nuclear war".
Re:Civ 5 is wrong (Score:2, Informative)
Hate to rain on your parade, but the US had nukes before internet too.
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is tech news? (Score:5, Informative)
And the category of the story... ie, this is at tech.slashdot.org. And right before the title it says "Technology:"
Re:It would go nuclear (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. The US has a very strong "no first use" policy regarding nuclear weapons...
No we don't. Not for North Korea. In April 2010 we extended our no first use policy for almost everyone, but very specifically excluded Iran and North Korea.
Our policy still indicates that we are very much interested in exhausting all options, and everyone seems to get that Nukes are terrible (though as little as a few years ago Bush had allowed for us to Nuke anyone that might have WMDs, or a towel on their head).
But we specifically excluded NK in our no first use policy. I don't think we'd ever want to be the ones to use them first, but we could.
-Taylor
Re:I'm sure they're (Score:5, Informative)
The NK Army never lost a war, just battles. Don't forget that bit either.
This is completely false. The North Korean military was completely and utterly routed to the Chinese side of the border in almost every single China-DPRK border province. North Korea was entirely defeated when 300,000 Chinese troops moved at night under orders of strict silence to repel the joint American and South Korean forces that were standing just on the south side of the Yalu and Tumen rivers.
Then there are the Crab Wars of the 1990s between South Korea and North Korea. There were a small number of victories on the littoral seas in the beginning for North Korea, but they soon began losing every skirmish they started and had to stop provoking the losses of their own ships. The DPRK lost this entire campaign.
The North Korean Army was defeated in 1950. (Score:5, Informative)
The NK Army never lost a war, just battles. Don't forget that bit either.
No, the UN forces flat-out defeated the North Korean Army in 1950. The war only lasted beyond that because the Chinese took over. Just look at the strengths of the top 5 combatants (Wikipedia numbers, yeah):
Yes, Communist China fielded 3.5x as many troops as the North Koreans. On top of that, right before the war they gave the North Koreans 70,000+ ethnic Korean soldiers from the Chinese People's Liberation Army, including two already-organized, experienced ethnic Korean divisions that had fought in the Chinese civil war. Kim Il Sung invaded the south only after Mao promised to send forces if the USA intervened. The Chinese Communists really, really threw their support behind North Korea.