The NORK Nukes - 2017 International Tour!

In what may well be the most NORK-y Fourth of July fireworks display ever, the Pyongyang regime appears to have successfully tested a nuclear-capable missile with the range to reach the western portions of North America; by definition an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The linked article does a good job discussing the strategic implications of this success, but the tl:dr version is "there are no good military options".

Simply put, the DPRK appears to have obtained what Stalin's Soviet Union did in the 1940s; a successful defense against U.S. military strongarming. Never a particularly good idea, given the NORK capabilities for inflicting nasty mayhem to American-aligned nations in northeast Asia, if the NORKs have the capability to directly threaten the U.S. mainland this option goes from "barely conceivable" to "off the table".

What's more, the strategic calculus of potentially-holding-U.S.-population-centers-hostage changes the relationship between the U.S. and Asian allies such as Japan and South Korea. If Trump wanted the Japanese government to start building its own nukes Pyongyang may well have given it the same push that the Soviets gave the British and French governments during the Cold War - the worry that the Land of the Big PX would be hesitant to risk its own civilians in the face of a possible nuclear exchange.

Where does the Tangerine Toddler fit into all this? Swinging the Big Stupid bat, of course. The King of the Deal is discovering what diplomats and potentates throughout history have discovered, albeit at his own, short-bus-slow-reader speed; that polities with interests that conflict with your own can't always - and often won't ever - be coaxed, swayed, or bullied into acting against their own interests. China fears a NORK collapse more than anything the U.S. can threaten. Figuring out a way to adjust U.S. geopolitical approaches to the new northeast Asian realities will require a hell of a lot more patience, creativity, and intelligence than either the current Chief Executive - who seems more interested in ginning up a "Blut und Ehre" white nationalist agenda - or his people have shown to date.

Nukes are funny things. Technically they are "weapons of war"...but they work well only as potential, not kinetic, energy. When the first nuke is thrown at a nuclear-armed adversary they have effectively lost much of their usefulness. If war is the "continuation of politics by other means" the problem with nuclear war is that, unlike politics, there is no real way to plan or predict or strategize what happens after the fallout settles. A single warhead getting through to a single city will mean that even the "winner" will suffer. There is little consolation for the "winning" public knowing that the northern portion of the Korean peninsula is a glassy wasteland.

Maintaining the nuclear balance was a difficult task for U.S. leaders like Truman and Eisenhower. What happens when the launch codes are clutched in the stubby fingers of a man whose primary education in conflict was as a WWF wrestling heel is something that I'm not sure I want to find out.

Smoking guns and mushroom clouds

The generation of this post came from a headline on my Comcast website (where I go to check my e-mail): "Rare picture of split mushroom cloud found" Here's the pic:

I followed the original article and found a irkingly cryptic story about this picture.

Apparently the "split" cloud over Hiroshima had already been seen in 1945; photographed by observers aboard one of the aircraft accompanying Enola Gay (tagged, by the way, with a terrific name for an implement of mass destruction: Necessary Evil).

Here's that snapshot - note that the upper "cap" cloud has pretty much separated from the "stem":

The thing I couldn't get from either the initial story linked by Comcast or the History Blog post I linked to above was - what was so fucking terrific about this picture?

I mean, was this some sort of truly odd, unusual atomic phenomenon?

Did the split in the Hiroshima cloud indicate that some really peculiar atmospheric condition, or some bizarre anomaly in the detonation, had resulted in this strange cloud formation that was never seen again during the many atmospheric nuclear tests conducted during the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties?

Okay, no.

The photo above is from the "Charlie" shot in the "Buster-Jangle" test series conducted in October and November of 1951. Note the double separations, the upper between the "cap" and "stem" as well as a lower split in the stem.

That led me to further research into the whole "mushroom cloud" business. Seems that these things are not just a nuclear signature. Any sufficiently large explosion will create them. The fireball of the explosion creates the "cap" as it rises, and the low pressure beneath the cap causes entrainment of the surrounding air and the moisture in the rising air condenses.

Not surprisingly, all this rising and condensing is dependent on the ambient air temperatures and pressures, so that if the rising cloud encounters a warmer air layer at altitude there will be no cloud formation, or the water droplets will evaporate again...

So it turns out that the photo itself was the big deal, if big deal it was, not the "split cloud".

And even that was not really all that such of a muchness; the photo had been published years earlier. It was the actual photo print that had been lost for some time and recently rediscovered.

So. No frightful new nuclear revelations, just a tiny bit of historical documentation come back to light.

Well, okay then. Let's dance!

Now I am become Death, destroyer of Worlds.