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How much trouble can North Korea's nuclear weapons cause?
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North Korea has been making the news recently by throwing it’s nuclear weight around. But how dangerous is North Korea? They have not had nuclear weapons for very long and their missile technology is still quit limited, so what threat do they pose to us? The people who are in the most immediate danger are the South Koreans and the US military personnel stationed there. If North Korea became capable of mounting a nuclear device on one of their short-range missile, such as the Rodong-2, than all of South Korea and even Japan could be attacked. However, the current state of the North Korean nuclear arsenal may not lend itself easily to such deployment.
Even if North Korea could manage to launch one of it’s dozen or so nuclear weapons at South Korea, or any other country, chances are it would be shot down over it’s own territory. The United States currently posses a range of anti-ballistic missile technologies including the Navy’s Aegis (which was used to destroy a satellite) and the Air Force’s YAL-1A. These technologies would virtually ensure the destruction of hostile missiles before they even cross North Korea’s borders.
The real threat is not from an easily detectable attack, but one that is less conspicuous. North Korea has been testing devices which have the same strength as the ones developed during World War 2. These are on the order of 15 kilotons. Though such a bomb is literally thousands of times weaker than ones the US has tested, detonation of such a weapon high in the atmosphere could create an EMP that would cause a surge in any unprotected active electronic device (and burn it out) over an area of potentially thousands or even millions of square miles. North Korea’s Taipodong-2 could lift a nuclear device to sufficient height near the Western US, but would likely be shot down before detonation. A more efficient use of such a weapon would be either to smuggle it into the area of use (via ground or sea) or utilizing the fissile materials in a dirty bomb. Such a device, if exploded in a large enough metropolitan area, could sicken and kill thousands of people and render the attack site useless for an extended period of time.
The state of the situation is such that extreme caution must be exercised. We cannot afford to ignore North Korea, yet we are able to simply invade the country as we did Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not immediately clear what the long term goal of Kim Jong Il is but if North Korea decides to utilize it’s fledgling nuclear arsenal it would surely provide a challenge to our advanced security and defense systems, one that they could likely meet. In any event, it seems that North Korea has utilized it's nuclear arsenal in the manner most sucessfully demonstrated since their invention; as a deterrent to war and invasion.
