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Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

> North Korea will increase the range of its missiles to reliably hit the entire US.

Getting a ballistic missile to hit the continental US is the first of many problems they'll need to solve before I start losing any sleep.

They also need to be able to hit a location accurately.

And they need a hypersonic reentry vehicle capable of delivering a nuclear payload without disintegrating the bomb or prematurely burning up the explosives in it.

Those are incredibly difficult problems, and each one keeps getting worse.

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North Korea has successfully tested multiple missile launches on a lofted trajectory that demonstrated an intercontinental range. I believe both the hwasong 17 and 18 are capable of hitting the continental United States. Rentry vehicles have been demonstrated multiple times. Accuracy is a bit more of a concern, but with a thermonuclear weapon missing a city by 10 miles is still more than enough to cause millions of casualties.

The DPRK is absolutely a totalitarian, backwards, hermit kingdom. But we underestimate them at our peril.

DPRK does not seem too have the hydrogen bomb. Fission bombs on the kiloton range are too heavy to be mounted on ICBMs. I will not lose much sleep until there is credible information that DPRK has mastered the fusion bomb.

No, their last nuclear test was estimated at around 250 kilotons, which is indicative of a thermonuclear bomb. That was in 2017

Jesus, I hadn't realized they had come so far. Apparently NK gained the ability to hit the entire continental US with Hwasong 15. The latest iterations are suspected of being designed to contain MRVs or MIRVs, which would completely overwhelm US missile defenses. It is insane that we let them go down this road.

Even they know that if one launched from their end they would all cease to exist within minutes.

This is a deterrent until Kim Jong Un loses his marbles or receives a terminal diagnosis, or until some military commander makes a serious mistake. Now multiply this same risk times fifty or sixty and you’ll see why the major project of the 20th century was limiting the number of countries with nukes.

There’s a good chance they fail since our intelligence services are essentially watching everything they do internally in real time.

And a proper failure gives an opportunity to disappear them.

> Those are incredibly difficult problems, and each one keeps getting worse.

Indeed, so hard that it took until 1957 for the US to master them....

Not trivialize the effort of making such rockets and reentry vehicles, but the North Koreans only have 6-10 countries to follow, at least two of which are semi-friendly to them and two more that they could crib tech from. Oh, and they have computers and it's not the 1950s anymore.

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