Say Anything Blog

One of my favorite war historians, John Keegan has an interesting analysis published in the Torygraph. He is responding to press reports of the President admitting a comparison between ‘nam and Iraq.

It’s a great read, but this is my favorite part:

Vietnam was one of the largest and costliest wars in history. The insurgency in Iraq resembles one of the colonial disturbances of imperial history.

There is a good reason for the difference. The Vietnamese communists had organised and operated a countryside politico-military organisation with branches in almost every village. The North Vietnamese People’s Army resembled that of an organised Western state. It conscripted recruits throughout the country, trained, organised and equipped them.

The Iraqi insurgency, by contrast, is an informal undertaking by a coalition of religious and ex-Ba’athist groups. It has no high command or bureaucracy resembling the disciplined Marxist structures of North Vietnam. It has some support from like-minded groups in neighbouring countries, but nothing to compare with the North Vietnamese international network, which was supported by China and the Soviet Union and imported arms and munitions from both those countries on a large scale.

North Vietnam was, moreover, a sovereign state, supported explicitly by all other communist countries and by many sympathetic regimes in the Third World. The Iraqi insurgency has sympathisers, but they enjoy no organised system of support and are actively opposed by many of their neighbours and Muslim co-religionists.

The recent upsurge of violence in Iraq in no way resembles the Tet offensive. At Tet, the Vietnamese new year, the North Vietnamese People’s Army simultaneously attacked 40 cities and towns in South Vietnam, using 84,000 troops. Of those, the communists lost 45,000 killed. No such losses have been recorded in Iraq at any place or any time. The Tet offensive proved to be a military disaster for the Vietnamese communists. It left them scarcely able to keep up their long-running, low-level war against the South Vietnamese government and the American army.

The Beeb is reporting that US now claims to have measured radiation from the apparent failed nuclear test performed by North Korea.

If this is confirmed, we can say with confidence that stone age countries need not apply for membership in the exclusive World Nuclear Club.

More seriously, since North Korea had at maximum 24 kg weapons-grade plutonium, and the critical mass needed for a standard test is at least 6 kg, this leaves them with at most enough plutonium for three more bombs, and possibly only two. 

Let’s hope for one more dude dud, and absent a successful (and also technically demanding) uranium enrichment program, they will have managed to successfully make themselves both laughingstocks and render themselves impotent at the same time.  (Fuel for one bomb, absent a successful demonstration, does not make much of a deterrent.)

CNN confirms that the North Korean nuclear bomb test was a failure.  According to government sources, the design goal was 4 kT, but the actual yield was less than 0.5kT.  If this is a plutonium bomb as reported, then I would speculate the problem was an excess of isotope P240 (which causes pre-detonation and a marginal yield).  See this Wiki article for more details on that.

This probably explains why little or no radioactive emissions have been detected (the energetics of a full-throttled nuclear explosion makes the complete containment of radioactive gases highly problematic!)

I’ll also point out that building a weapon that can be detonated in a tunnel is a much easier job than building one that is payload compatible for an intercontinental missile.  This is good news to counter reports that North Korea may have enough fissile material for ten bombs.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and they use up their reserves trying to make a bomb that works.  Really, haven’t they learned anything from the United States?  They should outsource for the nuclear technology, just like Iran did.

Update: Thanks to Rob for pointing out my typo! I can now say with confidence that the problem of transvestite nuclear bombs in the North Korean Navy is relatively under control.