The US couldn't just fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes. Most likely every single one of those helicopters would end up being shot down.
The existence of a plan does not equate to the feasibility of its execution. A submarine-based deterrent is indeed the "gold standard" for survivability, but it is not the only standard. There is enough pain for the US that they wouldn't actually attack Pakistan.
The US does have the advantage that the surviving Pakistani nukes might very well end up flying to India instead :)
These are the states whose Senators are in play this year [1].
Let's say Trump decides it's fuck-around-with-Islamabad-o'clock. He fucks around. Pakistan nukes at India. How many of those Senate seats flip as a result? I'm going to guess none.
Let's go one step further. Pakistan nukes Al Udeid and Camp Arifjan (both theoretically within range of their Shaheen-III). American troops are killed. Does the President's party lose any seats? At that point, I'd bet on a rally-'round-the-flag effect.
The truth is there isn't political downside to the President fucking around with Pakistan. Its nuclear deterrent isn't designed to contain America. And it can't threaten us with maybe the one thing that could make Trump suffer, a refugee crisis.
If America does something to pakistan, then pakistan wouldn't bomb India but rather America
In your scenario India did literally nothing. I know the rivalry but even then India has its own nukes and if India wasn't part of the plan then case would be on America
A much more likely scenario is that Pakistan's military would take over (Pakistan has never been really stable after its independence) and their ties with china would grow and China would feel threatened as well and if things go the same as venezuela that is that Trump says that they would control pakistan for time being (similar to venezuela) then China would be genuinely pissed and a WW3 conflict can arise considering China could send their military there and the possibility of nuke could be a choice if the war really happens between America/China but the possibility of it is really really slim and depends on how the war goes.
This is a mistaken assumption. It is very likely that the nukes would always fly to India unless the US somehow communicated their intent before acting.
In a situation where you're launching nukes in retaliation, you're usually not waiting very long to think about where you're going to be sending them to.
This isn't an option. Not within a nuclear window. The only bases within range are Al Udeid and Camp Arifjan. Hence its inclusion in the above scenario.
> then China would be genuinely pissed and a WW3 conflict can arise
This is tantamount to saying Pakistan can't actually retaliate. Which is my point. Pakistan's nuclear deterrent doesn't actually deter America. China does.
It does, US cannot disregard the consequences of a strike on India regardless of their relationship with India.
On a normal day it'd probably not be a huge problem for Pakistani ballistic missiles to penetrate those bases’ own air defenses. However if the US was planning a strike, there'd certainly be Aegis BMD coverage there, which would be a problem. It's possible they'd even deploy THAAD to protect some bases.
Similarly, if a head of state is killed by poison or other similar means, you could hardly expect nuclear retaliation when their successor later discovers what happened.
An important part of deterrence is broadcasting that you've done this though. It all works much better if your enemies approximately understand your processes
Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention.
Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did.
No. The obstacle isn't Chinese intervention, the obstacle is that such an operation would have to be significantly larger and it would take longer. There would be much more air defense assets to suppress, and some of them would be impossible to effectively defeat.
A helicopter assault on either of those cities would in the most optimistic scenario take hours of preparatory bombing, which would give a plenty of time for nuclear retaliation by North Korea. Both countries would also certainly have better safeguarding mechanisms for their heads of state, during that bombing they would be evacuated and now you'd probably be looking at the very least at a weeks-long operation.
Assassination is a different thing, but I would suspect that for purely psychological reasons a rapid kidnapping operation like this would be far less likely to invite anything more than symbolic retaliation than a single targeted missile strike. This kind of operation would be far more confusing for the enemy than a simple assassination, and the window during which for example nuclear retaliation might make sense tends to be rather small.
>Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did.
Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one. They'd have shot down every single helicopter. You don't even need fancy missiles, a bunch of .50cal machine guns will do the trick.
I have serious doubts they can manage anything more than a fizzle yield, but also only give them a one-in-three chance of a successful ballistic launch. It may be the case that they don't even have the preparatory work done, in which case hours isn't enough to launch, they'd need days/weeks. In any event, we're talking about one or two missiles only, and the Navy's ability to shoot those down in the midcourse/terminal phase is sufficient for such a small salvo.
If North Korea wanted to nuke us, they'd be better off handing the warhead off to some terrorist group to truck it across the Mexican border. Supposing their stuff is even small enough to smuggle.
>Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one.
But it doesn't have a China willing to rush in with 1 million PLA infantry. Which is really North Korea's only saving grace. Even if we got Kim out before they could mobilize, they'd be strutting and posturing for weeks, and there are any number of places they could fuck things up in retaliation. Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, they might even stir shit up with India. They could, one supposes, send a few divisions to Russia on loan, and enter into the Ukraine fray. And no clever strategy is going to counter that stuff. Some of this stuff they're already considering and only hesitant... a North Korea operation might goad them into working up the courage to try it.
Why is that? Of the 6 North Korean nuclear tests, only the first one was so low-yield that it might have been a fizzle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_...
One, nobody exactly allows independent observers so we only really get seismo readings from those tests. And they don't make alot of sense. Yields should've been higher for plutonium cores, it's not lightweight stuff. And I wouldn't put it past them to have somehow pulled a fast one to fool foreign intelligence agencies (though stockpiling thousands of tons of high explosives fake a successful nuclear test seems beyond farcical). Just seems wrong.
Would that even work? I'd expect there to be obvious spectral differences, making such deception unrealistic.
https://www.armscontrol.org/blog/2013-04-26/ims-detects-radi...
The xenon isotopes involved have short half lives so if they were not produced by a nuclear explosion, they would have had to be released simultaneously by e.g. reprocessing a "hot" fresh batch of irradiated uranium at the same time as the underground explosion. This is not impossible, but it looks increasingly convoluted compared to an actual nuclear test.
Also, contra the upthread assertion that "Yields should've been higher for plutonium cores, it's not lightweight stuff," there is nothing about plutonium that drives high yield. The United States manufactured a large number of low yield (1.7 kiloton) plutonium warheads in the late 1950s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W25_(nuclear_warhead)
If North Korea aimed to make missile-deliverable weapons from the beginning (which makes sense because they don't have heavy bombers like the Cold War powers did at the beginning of their arms race), it also makes sense that their weapons tests would be focused on validating compact/lightweight designs instead of trying for high yield.
Still probably quite a bit different then helicopter inserted decapitation strike.
The US could probably bomb even Beijing, it doesn't really tell you anything that they were able to bomb Iran also.