I do not dismiss this threat.... and I do not care if it just an idle threat.
#1, The construction of a thermonuclear device is not that hard once you have the plutonium and the tritium. He has demonstrated by previous explosions that he has the Pu and the 3H is easy to make. Since he has shown in the past that his boasts can come true, why not take this one at face value?
#2, If a man points a pistol at me, I am not going to ask him to prove that it is loaded. I am going to shoot him, and most probably kill him. That is the risk he took when he aimed his pistol at me. Why not take him out now, by whatever method he requires us to use to achieve success in removing him and his nuclear forces from the world stage?
The great danger here is that Kim will set one off in Mid-Pac, then say, “That was just one of the 5 I have, all aimed at you.”
Then we are truly effed from a diplomacy standpoint.
That is pretty much their end game.
Don’t think I agree. Took the U.S. 7 years after Fat Man to develop a true H-bomb employing Teller-Ulam configuration.
What N. Korea is almost certainly talking about is a fusion-boosted weapon in which tritium is injected onto the pit immediately before implosion. The result is a small amount of fusion. But the main purpose is to increase the neutron flux to improve fission efficiency of the primary. The vast majority of the weapon yield is still due to fission not fusion. In contrast, for a two-stage Teller-Ulam bomb, roughly 90% of energy is due to fusion of secondary.