A world without nuclear weapons?

> From: Dan Wylie-Sears
> Spacefaring is a light aircraft, to ICBMs being a cruise missile?
> How can you have the ability to get to orbit, and not

How do you build a vehicle that can fly 1000 miles, carry a 100kg
cargo/warhead and can be fitted with an autopilot - and not have the
capacity to use it as a cruise missile? Oh wait, you can't. Because they are
functionally the same thing.

I did not say the two were unrelated. I said that people who imagine that
ICBMs are the *only* application of rocket technology are stupid idiots. And
this would include the vast majority of talking heads on the news channel.
As a consequence of this attitude, which usually goes completely
unchallenged by said talking heads, basic information about parts of the ISS
(like the doors) are considered highly classified weapons technology. It is
a stupid attitude and it gets in the way of peaceful applications of space
technology.

> Or how
> can you have a high enough precision and reliability to
> launch people or multi-million-dollar satellites,

Something else NK doesn't have by the way. But to answer your question,
parking in orbit is actually slightly easier than hitting a precise target
on the ground. Especially if you have radar assistance, and several orbits
to get it exactly right. If you want to miss a ground target by less than
ten miles or so it's really really tricky to get it right without a lot of
practice.

> In other words, they're close
> enough to having nuclear weapons that having the capacity to
> deliver them when and if they get them is something that the
> US isn't going to be happy with.

Detonatable nukes doesn't translate to deliverable nukes. The first hydrogen
bomb weighed close to 50 tons. Building it and doing that famous
disappearing trick with Bikini Atoll didn't mean American was instantly
capable of H-bombs on their missiles.

> It matters what the top of the hierarchy of threats is.

Not really. Russia destroying America 10 times over is just as bad as Russia
destroying America once. It is already impossible for America to invade
North Korea in the manner they invaded Iraq. Making it doubly or triply
impossible doesn't change anything.

> We're not going to deliberately provoke a massive attack on
> Japan and South Korea, except as a response to something
> almost as bad.

Then America has no option for first strike. North Korea doesn't want to be
exterminated completely, so they have no option for first strike. In both
cases China would probably strike back at the aggressor. Introducing nukes
into this equation on NK's side will not change anything.

John