War of words over Nukes - bigger may not be better

Who and what survives in a nuclear showdown will be a question of who has how many and how big a country you are

In the ensuing “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” duel between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un the question to ask should not be who has bigger missiles, or a switch to launch them for that matter, but who has how many nukes.

What perhaps the world should be looking at is whether North Korea does really have enough nukes at its disposal to carry out its threats, and if so, how powerful are these missiles to reach the target countries. 

According to some reports, recent North Korean tests and launches do show the country either already has, or has displayed enough capability to arm its Hwasong-15 missiles with “super heavy warheads” that can strike the US mainland – given the time and airspace to let it do so.

A test missile launched by North Korea on November 29 last year flew nearly 3000 miles at a vertical trajectory in 53 minutes. According to some experts, this means the missile would have a range of over 8100 miles on a standard trajectory. So theoretically speaking, the ICBM does have the capacity to traverse the roughly 6800 miles (11,000 kms) from Pyongyang to Washington DC, a distance which a commercial airliner would take a little over 13 hours to cover, in just a matter of two hours.

However, two hours is a lifetime in nuke-speak. And added to that the Hwasong-15, like its previous generation missile, Hwasong-14 is a massive projectile that makes for an easy target in the sky notwithstanding its speed. This means the US BMD system has enough time and enough of a target to aim at in the roughly 120 minutes that it will take the missile to reach the Eastern shores of the country.

But again, it is not so simple. The situation could be quite different based on where and how many missiles are targeted by Kim Jong at the US. Military experts point out having a nation-wide BMD system is an impossibility both physically and financially. 

Therefore, nations plan their BMDs for strategic locations choosing only the most critical and indispensable installations for protection safeguarding against total annihilation and ensuring retaliation against the enemy.

While it is physically not impossible to spread a blanket of missile defence systems across the country, it is also not feasible to stop all the missiles dropping in from the skies. For instance, on March 6, 2017 North Korea simultaneously fired four Hwasong-7 extended range scuds practically displaying its capability to launch multiple attacks within seconds of each other.

If this is so, the question then boils down to how many nukes does Kim Jong actually have? Are there enough of them to target both the US, Japan and South Korea apart from sundry other countries before North Korea itself is annihilated in retaliatory fire. If statics are anything to go by, the numbers are clearly stacked against Kim Jong and in fact he may not have enough warheads to arm the rockets he has been shooting off into the sky.

According to the latest data from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which tracks nuke arsenals across the world, North Korea was estimated to have a stockpile of just between 10 and 20 nukes as of end of 2017. Compared to this the US has a confirmed stockpile of 4000 warheads apart from approximately 2,600 retired warheads that are yet to be dismantled. So, clearly the numbers are not o Kim’s side. 

Nobody knows this better than Kim Jong himself. Not surprisingly, there is a clear method to his madness and the relatively young dictator has been moving his pieces smartly so that he can have his cake and eat it too. He knows very well he cannot go beyond sabre rattling and has made just enough noise to tell the world that he is not a push over while making overtures towards the South Koreans to open the gates for reconciliation.

One need not feel surprised if sometime in the near future Kim manages to wrangle some concessions from the West while he also gets to keep his nukes. 

(This article first appears on Veooz Publishing Platform)