What if north korea nukes us

He noted that North Korea has shut down its borders completely in an effort to tamp down the spread of Covid, including imports of food and medicine from China.

In so doing, it has imposed a blockade on itself more draconian than sanctions, which don't usually cover humanitarian aid. Even with a less ambitious objective, arms control negotiations with North Korea would be "really, really hard," Brewer said, particularly because Pyongyang has tended to fiercely resist any inspection or verification mechanisms.

And any restrictions on the North's weapons systems would have to be verified on the ground, he said, not just via U. Intelligence officials say North Korea has no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons, leaving the Biden administration faced with a series of unpalatable options. They range from attempting to restart talks that have a history of failure to a military strike that could have disastrous repercussions.

After two failed presidential summits with Trump, North Korea has greeted the incoming Biden team with a series of provocations, including harsh rhetoric and a short-range missile test. But so far, the regime has not taken the far more provocative steps of testing a long-range missile or a nuclear weapon, both of which it has done previously. There is always a chance, however, that Biden's bid for negotiations fails, and North Korea falls back on its pattern of aggressive and attention-seeking behavior, including threatening its neighbors and testing dangerous weapons.

If that happens, the only real option short of war — covert CIA operations aside — is more economic sanctions, experts say. Critics point out that years of sanctions of various kinds have failed to convince the North to denuclearize. But in fact, observers say, the U. Those sanctions included penalties against European and other banks accused of violating the law by doing business with Iran.

So far, no administration has been willing to levy similar "secondary sanctions" against Chinese banks that keep North Korea afloat. Unlike ballistic missiles, current UN Security Council sanctions do not prohibit North Korea from testing cruise missiles. The hypersonic missile recently tested can travel at much faster speeds. It's believed that it also has technology for it to be transported and stored fully fuelled, allowing for quicker launch times and making it difficult for adversaries to launch a pre-emptive strike.

On 3 September , North Korea conducted by far its largest nuclear test to date, at its Punggye-ri test site. Estimates of the device's explosive power, or yield, ranged from kilotons. A yield of kilotons would make the test six times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in North Korea claimed this test was its first thermonuclear weapon - the most potent form of nuclear explosion where an atomic detonation is boosted by a secondary fusion process to produce a far bigger blast.

In April , North Korea announced it would suspend further nuclear tests because its capabilities had been "verified". North Korea also promised to dismantle the Punggye-ri site and in May blew up some of the tunnels in the presence of foreign journalists - but with no international experts.

As dialogue got underway between Kim Jong-un and President Trump's administration that year, Pyongyang also said that it would destroy all its nuclear material enrichment facilities. The UN's atomic agency reported in August that on the basis of satellite imagery, it appeared North Korea had restarted the Yongbyon reactor, thought to be its main source of weapons-grade plutonium. The International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA said in September that the nuclear programme was going "full steam ahead," with work on plutonium separation, uranium enrichment and other activities.

North Korea has one of the largest standing armies in the world - with more than one million army personnel and estimated reserves of some , Much of its equipment is old and obsolete, but its conventional forces could still inflict massive damage on South Korea in the event of war. North Korea also has around tens of thousands of special forces troops which could be expected to infiltrate the South in the event of any conflict.

A further threat comes from thousands of North Korean artillery pieces and rocket launchers deployed along the border, putting South Korea, including the capital Seoul, which is a distance of less than 60km, well within range. In , the South Korean government assessed that North Korea could have between 2, and 5, tons of chemical weapons, potentially one of the largest stockpiles in the world. And there've also been concerns that North Korea could have a biological weapons programme, although very little is known about it and how far advanced it might be.

Read more from Reality Check. Send us your questions. North Korea unveils new submarine-launched missile. US report urges space missile defence. The consensus view is that Kim would try to level the playing field by using his vast arsenal of chemical weapons, which is believed to be the biggest and most technologically advanced in the world.

Kim is estimated to have between 2, and 5, metric tons of deadly nerve agents like sarin , which can cause paralysis and, ultimately, death. With so many artillery pieces and rocket launchers trained on Seoul, Kim has the ability to quickly blanket the densely packed city with huge amounts of nerve agents.

The human toll would be staggeringly high: The military historian Reid Kirby estimated last June that a sustained sarin attack could kill up to 2. It would be mass murder on a scale rarely seen in human history. Kim also has large quantities of VX , an even deadlier chemical weapon, and has already shown a willingness, and ability, to use it against civilian targets abroad.

Retired Lt. The fact that they were able to use it so precisely — to kill only one person and not even injure the two handlers — indicates a high degree of technical skill and a clear willingness to use a weapon of mass destruction against civilian targets.

That needs to be factored into the equation when we think about what Kim would do to preempt an attack or retaliate for one. The Pentagon already assumes that its airbases in and around South Korea would be among the first places Kim tried to hit with chemical weapons like sarin. But they worry an attack could nevertheless make it significantly harder for the US to launch air raids against the North by causing panic and chaos on the bases that house the American warplanes, bombers, and troops.

Retired Air Force Lt. Washington would also try to kill senior North Korean military commanders and government officials, including Kim. They try to game out all the various ways North Korea could hit the facilities, and to prepare accordingly. The Pentagon has a sizable military presence in neighboring Japan, and the island of Guam is a US territory that is home to more than , American citizens.

Andrew Weber, formerly the assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs, told me that the US and South Korea would also need to be prepared for Kim to use biological weapons against both military and civilian targets.

They are some of the most frightening substances on earth, and Weber expects some of them to be used against South Korean ports, airfields, and cities as a way of killing large numbers of civilians and troops while causing terror on a nationwide scale. North Korea could theoretically fire missiles with payloads of anthrax or other biological weapons into South Korea, or use drones to disperse the lethal substances from the air.

The researchers wrote that Kim could also have some of his citizens secretly bring the weapons into the South:. North Korea has , special forces; even a handful of those special forces armed with BW would be enough to devastate South Korea. What is alarming about human vectors is that they do not need sophisticated training or technology to spread BW amongst the targets, and they are difficult to detect in advance of an attack.

It is theoretically possible that North Korean sleeper agents disguised as cleaning and disinfection personnel could disperse BW agents with backpack sprayers. Another possibility is that North Korean agents will introduce BW into water supplies for major metropolitan areas.

In , Weber helped design a war game centered on a simulated North Korean biological weapons attack on the South. The exercise, Able Response , brought together hundreds of military and civilian officials from the US and South Korea.

The goals were to figure out the best ways to detect an attack, identify what substance had been used, limit the spread of the virus, and then rush vaccines and other medical care to the infected to save as many lives as possible. US bases in South Korea received new environmental surveillance systems designed to quickly detect the presence of a biological agent.

Still, Weber said his main takeaway was the near impossibility of preventing biological weapons from killing an astonishing number of people. In some cases, it was significantly higher because the infection spread to Japan or other nearby countries. North Korea is thought to have about 50 nukes. The US, by contrast, has an astonishing 6, nuclear weapons surpassed only by Russia, which has an estimated 7, weapons. Trump — or one of his successors — could respond to a North Korean nuclear strike by destroying every major North Korean city in a matter of hours.

Experts inside and outside the US government who study North Korea say that Kim is a rational leader with a singular focus on maintaining control of his country. And for a long time, they believed that Kim would only use his nuclear weapons if he were facing military defeat and the imminent collapse of his government. It would be the last gasp of a dying regime, one determined to kill as many of its enemies as possible before the end came.

Those assessments have now changed. Most of the experts I spoke to believe North Korea would use nuclear weapons at the beginning of a war — not at the end. And most of them believe Kim would be making a rational decision, not a crazy or suicidal one, if he gave the launch order. He remembers that the walls were covered with graffiti praising Kim.