Well, a bomb, at least.
Actually, he may not even have that, since he just set it off, but he could make more if he wanted. And don't you forget it.
China described the test as "brazen", which might qualify as the understatement of the year. Unwilling to be outdone in Strategic Intercontinental Understatements, the US said that an NK nuke test would be a "provocative act". Off the record, a US DoD source said "We've been telling you and telling you, so don't even pretend to act surprised."
Publically, the South Korean president wanted the world to know that the ROK would "react sternly and calmly". Privately, I doubt he was all that calm.
More as the story develops...
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Sheesh, the things you do when you're ronery...
*gulp*
Is it wrong that I don't much care? I mean hell, it seems like he pulled a Chávez and overplayed his hand. For the love of Crom Cruach, he even managed to piss China off and has made Japan want the bomb.
I'm more worried about property taxes, m'self.
Even the ROK's campus radicals are crapping in their shorts this morning.
My dad is an ex-nuclear weapons officer for the USArmy and he tends to keep abreast of the subjuect. I asked him this morming what he thought about the Japanese devolping nukes to combat this. His response, "Developing?"
I then asked how long it would take for them to have nukes, his reply, "Oh, about lunch time, if you eat fairly early."
Brass
"Hobie said...
Even the ROK's campus radicals are crapping in their shorts this morning."
Yeah, there's definitely got to be some conflicted feelings in South Korea. Quite a few South Koreans look at the North Koreans as the racially pure ones. It was the driving force behind the get chummy movement between the two (culminating with them marching under one banner at the Olympics) over the last few years.
To quote:
This "bomb" yielded a blast of 550 tons NOT kilotons of tnt. So either it was a fizzle or a test of a battlefield nuke, the smallest most difficult kind to make, or the test was a fake.
Quite. Zero point five five KT is... erm... well, it's a wet fart to put it bluntly. The morbid thought lingers that a 550T blast is still quite a lot of Mk84s, and that if one was specifically looking for a Dirty Annie it's the way one may go, but all the same it's not going to be a hassle until we've got folk from our Air Wings taking photos of Sabres off their group commanders' walls and asking what it was like over Korea.
Which probably won't be next Tuesday.
After seeing this, I think the odds that the Norks are trying to pull our leg is a distinct possibility.
Or it could just be that I find the idea of Kim Jong Il pushing the switch on his ACME® brand dynamite plunger causes me to giggle uncontrollably.
Wow. My previous post is really awkwardly worded.
Unless someone goes all Osirak or Mers-el'Kabir, we'd better get used to these headlines.
And he's right about Japan, or any other advanced country with nuclear reactors. You can bet that if they suddenly needed a nuke, one would appear as if by magic.
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