December 7, 2008

At 0753 at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the attack that had triggered America's entry into World War II, sixty-seven years before, was ceremoniously commemorated, an honor guard, taps, a 21-gun salute, the bugle's notes and the rifles' crack drifting across the bay to the USS Arizona memorial, where Admiral Arthur Peterson, USN Ret., laid a wreath in memory of the sailors sleeping below, one of whom was his own grandfather.

On the West coast it was 1053, and in Washington D.C. it was one fifty-three in the afternoon, 1353 military time.

In 2006 America, tired of War in Iraq, had elected Democrats to modest majorities in both houses of Congress. Representative Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House, third in line for the presidency. In the spring of 2007, on a narrow, party-line vote, Congress, led by Senators John Kerry and Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer refused to authorize spending to continue the war in Iraq, and set September 30, 2007, as the deadline for complete withdrawal of American troops.

Not too mention-- once a nation has mastered the making of small, but powerful nukes, the next logical step is to use one as a fission primary and combine it with a fusion secondary of one of more stages, producing a thermonuclear weapon and thereby multiplying the yield many times, usually 10 times or more, without too much of a size or weight increase.

I would hazard to guess that , at the moment, NK is in possession of a VERY crude form of a fission weapon of large size and very small yield, compared to size, fuel use and weight. To produce a small nuclear bomb of around 3K.T. that could be fitted on a cruise missile that could fly over 1000 miles or more,(the warhead would have to weigh under 1000 pounds or less, most likely), they will need some VERY difficult advances in nuclear know-how, boosting techniques, neutron generation techniques, very pure plutonium, etc. Things like that took this country a couple of decades to accomplish. Of course, this is why they test in the first place. Further tests will enable them to improve their design, resulting in a smaller package with higher yield, until they have a deliverable weapon.

That is, of course, unless they have somehow gotten some of our technology "handed to them", in the past, by the previous administration.

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