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Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

> We have the capability to annihilate as much of NK as we need to prevent a counterattack

...from North Korea

If we start launching nukes in the direction of NK, how does China know it's going to stop in NK and not hit them? Do we call them up first? Then what do they say?

Is it totally out of the question that China would panic (or reason?) and counterattack? NK doesn't exist in a vacuum, and in fact NK wouldn't exist at all today had China not intervened in the last war.

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China would intervene for very good reasons.

NK is an ongoing humanitarian disaster right now. At the moment, everybody is standing by blaming the NK regime for not acting to resolve it. If you remove the regime, the crisis gets much worse. If you bomb the country, the crisis gets much, much worse.

When you are done bombing the snot out of NK, who will pick up the pieces? Who will be on the hook for millions of starving people? Who will be the neighbor that gets slammed by the masses of humanity in desperation?

You think China hasn't thought about all this? You think they won't automatically recognize the obvious and enormous threat to themselves? Every missile that lands in NK is a direct threat to China.

It's simple orbital mechanics to calculate the trajectory. ICBMs aren't like planes, it's not like they just fly to the target and stop. It's powered during the first minutes of flight and then it just coasts from there. The exception to this is MIRV ICBMs where warheads are deployed one at a time and the final stage changes orbit a bit before releasing the next warhead. MIRVs can't change their trajectory that much though, you can target multiple locations, but they have to be in a couple hundred kilometers of each other.

Basically if there's an ICBM flying over China and it looks like it's going to hit NK, there's no way to kill all of that horizontal velocity and significantly change its trajectory.

I’ve read that ICBMs are very hard to spot after the initial boost phase. That being the case, if I was an ICBM designer, I’d add a cold gas thruster to the payload stage that allowed the target to be adjusted or fine tuned while it was out of the atmosphere in a stealthy way — even a delta-V of just 100 m/s adds up to 280km when the missile takes 45 minutes to arrive.

The US wouldn't launch ICBMs at NK. They would be dropped from bombers or launched from subs/ships. Most likely bombers though, which is what all of the saber rattling in the news with B52s/B1s has been about.

Also, China has a defense treaty with NK and has very publicly stated that it will honor its treaty unless NK strikes first.

Personally, I don't think nuking North Korea would even be an effective use of resources. With modern military precision bombing I'd say it's serious overkill unless you want to destroy something like an entire carrier strike group or deliberately cause loss of civilian life.

Precision strikes could probably take out their nuclear and missile program, and much of the top leadership, and probably cause the regime to eventually collapse. The problem is their artillery, spread throughout the south of the country, that poses a major threat to South Korea.

Agreed. And which was the stated reason for the Clinton administration not bombing North Korea and why I find it weird that North Korea has pushed the nuclear weapon issue.

If North Korea can kill tens of thousands of people in Seoul in a few minutes with just artillery and no one wants to be responsible for that... then why do they feel the need for nukes?

One can envision a world where the US accepts South Korean losses as acceptable, if unfortunate. But I don’t think we would ever accept the loss of an American city.

Because they feel the United States might take the risk of damage to South Korea. As long as US citizens aren't involved (other than a few tourists and business people in Seoul), the US has less skin in the game. If NK can directly threaten the US, the US has to be more careful.

You’re assuming that China’s nuclear force posture is like that of the US or RF. It is much more robust against false alarms. Given the massive alert arsenal the US possesses, along with the historical fact that both the USSR and US sat out strong technical alerts of incoming massive strikes, rather than launch — it’s a good prior that they would sit it out.

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