How many nukes would it take to destroy North Korea?

Depends on tonnage, burst height, and the list of targets that need to be destroyed, which seems to vary a bit, but I don't know what anyone's baseline is. If you want to kill most of everyone there, Probably somewhere around 200 warheads.

>>34818791
>i want to kill 99% of eastern asia
uhhhh

>>34818882
>implying that's a problem

>>34818882
Not gonna happen with 300+ kiloton airbursts; the radiation is attenuated by the atmosphere before it reaches the ground, preventing the creation of additional radioisotopes beyond the casing and components of the bomb itself.

>>34818896
Dude radiation effects are not immediate and are a reality.
t.doc

>>34818901
Re-read what I said. Destroying North Korea with high yield nuclear weapons won't necessarily result in a large scale fallout event, on the assumption that the blasts are optimized for wide area over-pressure by setting them off at higher altitude. Thus, they absolutely would not kill 99% of East Asia.

>>34818791
3.50


Depending on the yield

>>34818901
>DUDE I HAVE NO ARGUMENT

>>34818918
I don't really understand how you think you can use nuclear weapons without having nuclear fallout from the blast. No matter where it's detonated at.

>>34818968
You're not parsing the statement correctly. I never said there would be no fallout. There will probably be a fair amount of it, in fact. What it won't be is a local extinction level event.

>>34818791
One Tsar bomba to rule them all

>>34818968
Fallout is about 100 to 1000x less dangerous than you seem to think.

With MIRV, probably just 1 missile. Really once pingpong is hit I'm sure most of the remaining military commanders would see that there isn't much they can do and give up.

'bout tree fiddy

Probability 4-6 for most of the industrial targets in PY, which is about standard.
It should only be necessary to use ground burst weapons on targets like rail yards and roads/runways, there aren't many such things in NoKo.
Across the DMZ, a good strategy may be to employ the heat flash effects of a wide dispersal of smaller yield bombs airbursted at medium height. This could be used to start a massive firestorm in the densely vegetated area north of the DMZ with minimal long term fallout. Finally, the norks don't have very strong bunkers and very accurate low yield bombs could be used to cause the kind of local overpressure needed to collapse these targets. However this would mean a lot of ground bursts, and a huge amount of fallout. A better approach would be SDB and MOPs applied liberally from B-2s and F35s, with a few more B2s loitering to interdict surface activity.
Finally the Norks plan to fight a guerrilla campaign in the dense vegetation and punishing altitude in the mountains in the northeast. Shock awe maybe be viable to dissuade this behaviour and key infrastructure must be destroyed in these regions to prevent a major force forming on the right flank of the ROK advancing towards PY.
Strictly tactical use should prove unnecessary and the initial strike should be limited to 1. Counterforce against Nork Nuclear facilities and 2. Operational counter force to facilitate a breakthrough north of the DMZ and shut down the much threatened Seoul "conventional" (chemical and nuclear) barrage.

>>34818968
Because airbursts produce negligible fallout.

>>34818968
Fallout is formed when the fireball of the explosion touches the ground, this creates a strong convection current that sucks a plume of debris and dust through the fireball itself and out the top.
The upshot is if the fireball doesn't touch the ground, this just doesn't happen and the amount of fallout material is reduced by >99%. And ground bursting weapons greatly reduces the potential blast radius, blast power (no mach stem effect), reduces line of sight and thus light and heat flash effects...
It's only worth it to destroy such things as deep bunkers and railroad yards or large roads. And you can destroy a deep bunker with a conventional penetrator, you only need to collapse the entrance as they say.

>>34819626
Hey Oppenheimer. What do you think is the chance that the Norks are planning on scattering ICBMs across the country side through "cargo shipments"? You know, move a few trucks here, a few trucks there, all of them with "industrial machinery", and then assemble a TEL (and missile, maybe) on site without us knowing.

Are there any ways we could detect that?

>>34818791
Such a task would not require nukes.

>>34819601
>Finally, the norks don't have very strong bunkers

Source?

That kind of thing seems almost impossible to confirm or deny.

6-10 Trident missiles would essentially end it.

>>34818882

Yes, I remember when 99% of north americans died during the years the US tested hundreds of nuclear weapons near las vegas.

>>34818880
>200 warheads
>To destroy a country the size of Pennsylvania.
This is why I stopped coming to /k/ for like 6 months

>>34818791
About tree-fiddy

>>34819663
I imagine that even low airbusts wouldn't produce much fallout either. The potential of a warhead to produce fallout depends on the peak neutron flux generated at the time of detonation. A fusion weapon has much greater potential than a fission-only weapon, yet the primary content of fallout are the fission products of the bomb's primary and tamper. Either way, low or high airburst, the potential of a bomb's neutron flux to even reach the ground is very limited, unless the bomb was optimized for the dispersion of neutron radiation, such as ERWs.

>>34821387
It makes more sense when you allocate two for every target and need ~40 warheads to flatten and burn North Korea's artillery across its southern border alone. When you add the destruction of every base and industrial center in the country with redundancy, the warhead count tends to get pretty big pretty fast.

>>34821387
That sounds close to my estimate. The Norks built tons of bunkers out of reinforced concrete. To take out every hardened military command center, we would need 3 nukes, with one being airburst, one ground-penetrating, and one in reserve.

>>34819097
nice b8

this is so fucking annoying we should run simulations instead of this dumb ass thread

>>34818791
>How many nukes would it take to destroy North Korea?

One, launched at the USA.