...At the bottom on the ninth...Nasa hits a homer!

D. Scott Ferrin wrote:

Bush should thank them for the expensive firework and express his
appreciation that they would join us in celebration of the 4th of July
LOL!



That _thing_ they'd managed to come up with that passes itself off as a
ICBM threat should be taken as seriously as if we had weaponized a a
Jupiter-C rocket.
It's a primitive little lash-up with virtually no throw weight between
continents whatsoever.

Pat

On Wed, 05 Jul 2006 02:34:10 GMT, robert casey
wrote:

I think we'd wait a bit longer than just a minute into flight to shoot
it down.

....Not if we wanted to cause the damn thing to hopefully fall back on
the pad and kill lots of engineers. And then 50 years later whoever
replaces Guth can claim that the NKVA were attempting to put a man
into orbit and we shot him down.

OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[

Pat Flannery wrote:

:It's a primitive little lash-up with virtually no throw weight between
:continents whatsoever.

And how small can you make a nuclear weapon, dumbass?

--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn

In article ,
Fred J. McCall wrote:
:It's a primitive little lash-up with virtually no throw weight between
:continents whatsoever.

And how small can you make a nuclear weapon, dumbass?

That's not the question; the question is how small the *North Koreans* can
make a nuclear weapon. And the answer, almost certainly, is "not very".
Really small nuclear weapons take an experienced weapons lab. They can
probably do better than the Manhattan Project did, because some of the
basic ideas of how to do better are now public knowledge, but their best
will still be big and heavy, for a while.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

On Thu, 06 Jul 2006 03:04:42 GMT, Fred J. McCall
wrote:

Pat Flannery wrote:

:It's a primitive little lash-up with virtually no throw weight between
:continents whatsoever.

And how small can you make a nuclear weapon, dumbass?

How small can WE make one or how small can THEY make one?. If you
pulled you're head out for a bit maybe you wouldn't end up looking
like a dumbass yourself.

D. Scott Ferrin wrote:



Pat Flannery wrote:

:It's a primitive little lash-up with virtually no throw weight between
:continents whatsoever.

And how small can you make a nuclear weapon, dumbass?



How small can WE make one or how small can THEY make one?. If you
pulled you're head out for a bit maybe you wouldn't end up looking
like a dumbass yourself.



They'd have to make a small nuclear warhead and develop a RV to carry it in.
They might be able to do that, but it would take a few tests to get it
right.
The big question is warhead yield and numbers of missiles they have.
If they were going with straight fission they'd have a hard time
cracking 100 kilotons (about five times Hiroshima size).
Such a warhead could do great damage if it hit a U.S. city... but if
you've only got a few missiles to carry such a warhead, then all you've
done is given the U.S. a very good excuse to wipe your country clean off
the map with a massive nuclear counterstrike.
Both their assembly/launch area and missile production plants are very
vulnerable to attack, so you are probably only going to get one missile
off before the Trident missile warheads begin to arrive all over the
place. (or Minuteman missiles for that matter; they are inside Minuteman
range).
Their missile is the wrong shape to put into a silo, and we haven't
noted any silo construction yet either.
At the moment they've got us in a frenzy over something that really
isn't much of a threat, and are using it to get concessions and make us
look like fools by doing nothing after we told them there would be very
serious repercussions if they launched the missile.
The proper response would have been to simply ignore them, or at least
keep them guessing about what our response would be, rather than issuing
hollow threats that we don't seem ready to back up.
They've won this round.

Pat

On Thu, 06 Jul 2006 14:24:58 -0500, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

They'd have to make a small nuclear warhead and develop a RV to carry it in.
They might be able to do that, but it would take a few tests to get it
right.
The big question is warhead yield and numbers of missiles they have.
If they were going with straight fission they'd have a hard time
cracking 100 kilotons (about five times Hiroshima size).
Such a warhead could do great damage if it hit a U.S. city... but if
you've only got a few missiles to carry such a warhead, then all you've
done is given the U.S. a very good excuse to wipe your country clean off
the map with a massive nuclear counterstrike.

You assume, without basis, that they're rational.

At the moment they've got us in a frenzy over something that really
isn't much of a threat

In what way are we "in a frenzy"?

and are using it to get concessions

How are they getting concessions?

and make us
look like fools by doing nothing after we told them there would be very
serious repercussions if they launched the missile.

There have been serious repercussions. They are the ones who look
like fools.

The proper response would have been to simply ignore them, or at least
keep them guessing about what our response would be, rather than issuing
hollow threats that we don't seem ready to back up.
They've won this round.

What planet have you been on this week, Pat?

This is complete nonsense. They've lost major face, their program is
now perceived as a joke, including to their potential customers,
they've alienated Russia and China, their only allies, and we now have
no particular reason to grant their nutty request for bilateral
negotiations.

What's really hilarious, of course, is that the usual suspects who
whine about our "unilateralism" (that doesn't exist) are now
complaining because we insist on involving all six parties in the
talks. Which shows, once again, that the only unifying, consistent
principle they have is knee-jerk reaction against anything that George
Bush does.

Henry Spencer wrote:

That's not the question; the question is how small the *North Koreans* can
make a nuclear weapon. And the answer, almost certainly, is "not very".
Really small nuclear weapons take an experienced weapons lab. They can
probably do better than the Manhattan Project did, because some of the
basic ideas of how to do better are now public knowledge, but their best
will still be big and heavy, for a while.



Assuming they actually have nuclear warheads (and that's a pretty big
assumption) their size and weight would probably mean that they are more
of a threat to South Korea or Japan than the U.S.
Considering how good the CIA's performance estimates on the Soviet
ICBMs proved to be, it seems odd that we can't even get a basic idea of
what the Taepodong-2 can do as far as range goes...sometimes it can
only reach the Aleutian Islands, other times it threatens the whole
continental U.S..

Pat

Henry Spencer wrote:

That's not the question; the question is how small the *North Koreans* can
make a nuclear weapon. And the answer, almost certainly, is "not very".
Really small nuclear weapons take an experienced weapons lab. They can
probably do better than the Manhattan Project did, because some of the
basic ideas of how to do better are now public knowledge, but their best
will still be big and heavy, for a while.

This is true. The thing is, even if they don't have heavy-lift capability
in a missile, it's still not all that difficult to put it in a shipping
container on the dock and let Yang Ming take it to the US. It's not very
rapid, but it's a much more likely scenario as far as actual nuclear
deployment goes.

Pat wrote:

Assuming they actually have nuclear warheads (and that's a pretty big
assumption) their size and weight would probably mean that they are more
of a threat to South Korea or Japan than the U.S.
Considering how good the CIA's performance estimates on the Soviet
ICBMs proved to be, it seems odd that we can't even get a basic idea of
what the Taepodong-2 can do as far as range goes...sometimes it can
only reach the Aleutian Islands, other times it threatens the whole
continental U.S..

So far it can't reach anywhere more than 40 seconds out. I am sure
some of the three-letter agency people have a good notion of what the
design altitude and endurance for the Taepodong-2 is, but whether it
can meet or exceed those numbers is still a big question.

I really seriously hope someone on our side has intercepted and started
reverse-engineering the telemetry from the thing.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Scott Dorsey wrote:

Henry Spencer wrote:


That's not the question; the question is how small the *North Koreans* can
make a nuclear weapon. And the answer, almost certainly, is "not very".
Really small nuclear weapons take an experienced weapons lab. They can
probably do better than the Manhattan Project did, because some of the
basic ideas of how to do better are now public knowledge, but their best
will still be big and heavy, for a while.



This is true. The thing is, even if they don't have heavy-lift capability
in a missile, it's still not all that difficult to put it in a shipping
container on the dock and let Yang Ming take it to the US. It's not very
rapid, but it's a much more likely scenario as far as actual nuclear
deployment goes.




So they ship it to the U.S. and set it off in San Francisco Bay...then
they get nuked.
The whole concept that they are going to do something like this hinges
on their country having a national death wish.
They are pretty crazy, but I don't think they are quite that crazy.



So far it can't reach anywhere more than 40 seconds out. I am sure
some of the three-letter agency people have a good notion of what the
design altitude and endurance for the Taepodong-2 is, but whether it
can meet or exceed those numbers is still a big question.

I really seriously hope someone on our side has intercepted and started
reverse-engineering the telemetry from the thing.



Cut to NSA headquarters:
"01001101 01100001 01100011 01100001 01110010 01110100 01101000 01110101
01110010 00100000 01110011 01110101 01100011 01101011
01110011.....'MacArthur sucks'? Huh?" ;-)

Pat