Growing up in the early sixties I remember people building fallout shelters and a fear people had of Soviet missles being launched at the US. The decade hadn’t passed before those bomb shelters were being converted into storage space and the worries of Soviet missles was greatly diminished. There were other, more pressing evils out there and it seemed that even though the US and the Soviet Union still had thousands of warheads pointed at each other it was pretty much decided that the fear of mutually assured destruction would prevent them from ever launching.

The cold war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it went whatever worries we had about nuclear weapons. Even though India and Pakistan joined the Nuclear Club neither country was showing any aggresive animosity toward anyone but each other so we still felt sort of safe from nuclear weapons being used by anyone. Destruction by nuclear weapons was just things that movies were based on.

Then North Korea started making a noise. For years, though, all of the tantrums that Kim Jung Il were throwing were good for was just to make eyes roll. Last night that changed.

North Korea is now a member of the Nuclear Club. Even China, who often just laughs and pats little Kim Jung Il on the head when he pull his tantrums is now showing concern. Talk is surfacing in Japan about talks of rewriting its constitution to allow for possible preemptive strikes when done in conjunction with other countries and arming itself with nuclear weapons. Even suggestions that South Korea may now be motivated to posess nuclear weapons of its own are circulating.

Someone is trying to alleve our fears over this with this:

Analysts say North Korea probably has enough fissile material to make six to eight nuclear bombs but probably lacks the technology to devise one small enough to mount on a missile.

But how long will it take to reduce the size of their device down to where it will fit in the back of a truck to be launched against US soldiers manning the frontier between North and South Korea? I don’t think we are looking at much more than a couple of years before they will have developed a warhead capable of being launched by one of their missles that you can bet they are currently working on improving.

I don’t want to scare anyone with my take on this but I do want people to recognize that we need to find out what it’s going to take to make the Chinese stop worrying about a unified Korea if we really want to get things back under control in this region. My biggest concern isn’t a nuclear North Korea, it’s a Nuclear Japan with a new constitution 40 years from now.

1 Comment

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  By Felix Miller, 10/11/2006 @ 12:12 pm

  It may be that I have never gotten over the 1950s, when I shared the same fears and read the same scary scenarios of nuclear annhilation as did Larry, but I still worry about these megaweapons.

  I still worry about the megaton bombs remaining in Russia’s arsenal, and in Britain and in France and in India and in Pakistan. Now North Korea seems on the verge of joining this deadly club, perhaps to be closely followed by Iran.

  Going back to Russia, I have seen assertions by some knowledgeable types (I have no capacity to judge how knowledgeable) that the stockpiles of missiles in Russia are so degraded by neglect that they could not be accurately delivered to specific targets. They might, in fact, go off during launch or even in their silos and other storage areas.

  From what little I do know, the prospect of some quantity of multi-megaton payloads detonating in Russia, or some intermediate place after launch, is just as scary as an attack that reaches this country. If enough bombs go off anywhere, life on this planet will get very, very problematic.

  And I won’t even contemplate the spread of existing, smaller weapons to terrorist groups. I am already in worry overload have put in print the above fears.

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