What would happen if North Korea nuked South Korea?
-/AFP/Getty Images North Korea has been stepping up incendiary rhetoric in the past few days, ostensibly in response to South Korean comments that it would attack the North’s nuclear installations in the event that Pyongyang launched atomic weapons. Once the North’s preemptive attack is underway, the Korean Central News Agency declared, “everything will turn to ...
-/AFP/Getty Images
Coupled with missile tests and diplomatic maneuvers, these comments are worrisome but not necessarily out of the ordinary for Pyongyang. Nevertheless,
If “everything” means all of
Very little reliable information exists, but based on aggregated seismic data from North Korea’s 2006 nuclear test, Harvard analyst Hui Zhang estimates (pdf) that the yield of that explosion was between 0.5 and 2 kilotons (for comparison, the yield of the weapon used at Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons, while other countries’ first nuclear tests generally yielded 9 kilotons or above). For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume
As for the number of weapons,
If, on the other hand,
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