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ThatDamnedPanda -> RE: North Korea backed down! (12/21/2010 6:54:00 PM)
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ORIGINAL: hertz
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ORIGINAL: KenDckey
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ORIGINAL: hertz
This is good news. It proves that conservative claims that the government of North Korea is bonkers is not true. When being baited by the only superpower in the world to use nuclear weapons against civilian targets, backing down is an eminently rational choice to make.
Didn't the History Channel have a program about where the Japanese used the first one in China? Just asking
That would be a possibility for the US edit, except for the little matter that it would imply the Japanese did fission before the US. And as we know, the US invented everything, so no-one would believe that. Unless there was a subplot involving soviet spies and wikileaks.
We certainly didn't invent everything, but we were the first to cross that bridge, anyway. There's no serious question about that.
Ken, I see the History Channel running a program every now and then that's called something like "The Secret Of Japan's Nuclear Bomb" or something like that, but I've never watched it. I suppose that's probably the one you're thinking of. I'll have to make a point of watching it next time, just out of curiosity.
I know they were pretty serious about developing one during the war, though. They had several projects going independently. Their Navy pulled the plug on one halfway through the war because they determined that the technical obstacles were insurmountable, but I believe the Army was working on one of their own right up until the end of the war. If I recall correctly, their uranium enrichment facility was destroyed by an American air raid, which set them back quite a bit. They didn't have time to rebuild, so they asked Germany for some uranium, but if I recall correctly the submarine that was supposed to deliver it was sunk. That was pretty much the Japanese Army's last chance to build a weapon before the end of the war.
I know that they had at least one more program working on the Korean Peninsula that was supposedly pretty far along, but the Russians captured the facility before they could complete a weapon. Supposedly they were almost ready to test one in the last weeks of the war, but from what I understand, post-war examination of technical documents indicate that they really hadn't gotten very far beyond the theoretical design phase, and were nowhere near building a functional warhead. Why in god's name they decided to build such a critical facility in occupied territory is a mystery to me, but if they'd had the foresight to do it on their own home islands, they might have had time to put one together before we beat them to the punch.
After the war, of course, they never officially resumed their efforts, but that doesn't mean much. If they ever do decide they need nukes, they'd have them ready to use within a year at the most - and maybe a lot less than that. They have plenty of material, and some of the best nuclear physicists in the world. For that reason, I would almost argue that it's very much in the best interests of both North Korea and China that the United States continue to play beat cop on the Korean Peninsula. If we ever decide to wash our hands of the Koreas once and for all, I think Japan would almost certainly feel they had no choice but to go nuclear. Neither Beijing nor Pyongyang woudl enjoy the prospect of a Japan with several hundred thermonuclear weapons mounted on state-of-the-art intermediate-range ICBMs.
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