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by jjk166
1297 days ago
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Remember that it took about 10 years for North Korea to go from it's first nuclear weapons test (which fizzled) to something that's probably a deliverable nuclear weapon, and they had spent decades before that to get to the first test. Nuclear weapons require great precision but they're not especially complicated devices. Any nation state, even the very poorest, should have no difficulty designing a nuclear weapon. It's the refinement of the design and the acquisition of the materials that is difficult, and even then the challenge is more in doing it clandestinely. Even then, the cost of the manhattan project, which not only developed two different nuclear weapons in 4 years, but also discovered a lot of the basic underlying physics from scratch, all in secret and with 1940s era equipment cost about $23 Billion adjusted for inflation. Similarly, the development contract for first American ICBM cost about $4 Billion in todays dollars. North Korea benefits from decades of scientific and technological advancement since that time, and it doesn't cost much to employ someone when you can throw their family into a camp, but even if we assume that it nevertheless would cost them as much to develop such technologies, over the course of 30 years that still represents a reasonably small fraction of North Korea's GDP. North Korea's long history of failures are pretty clear evidence that they were not given the design and manufacturing capability necessary to produce working nuclear weapons or missile systems. While no doubt there has been communication with other state actors over the decades, the idea that they are receiving active support is not at all supported by evidence, and indeed the embarrassingly long development time implies that either there is a great deal of incompetence in the development effort, active sabotage, or likely both. |
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