OT: Nuclear Situation in Korea

[Webstral]

Now that's thinking outside the box! I like it. That's a very long tunnel, but I suppose the North Koreans have had a while to work on the project.

[kato13]

My fear is that a mini sub delivers a bomb to Inchon. I don't believe that the DPRK could deliver a bomb via a plane or missile (too large of a device), so that leaves either a ship/sub or truck.

A hit on Incheon (costal) would screw up the Seoul Airport, International shipping, Refining, Power Generation, part of Seoul's mass transit system, and given prevailing winds would place in danger the lives of at least 3 million people.

I am not sure if a mini sub could work its way up the Han river, but if Seoul gets hit, that is how I would expect the DPRK to do it. A hit on the Gangnam district (yes the one mentioned in the song) would cut out the heart of the city. Seoul averages about 45,000 people per square mile so causalities would be enormous.

As far as tunnels I could see an underground nuke being used to disrupt the border defenses, but it would be really hard to dig far enough for an underground fission device to cause a huge amount of damage to Seoul.

[Targan]

A 50km tunnel would be a big job but I guess the NKs have had 60 years. I assume the South Koreans go to great lengths to identify tunnels from the north.

[Webstral]

Does anybody know how you find tunnels the owners don't want found? I know ground penetrating radar has come a fair distance since the US started trying to use it against the Vietnamese Communists, but I have no idea what the state of the art is. Can you use sonic technology?

[Schone23666]

Originally Posted by Webstral

Does anybody know how you find tunnels the owners don't want found? I know ground penetrating radar has come a fair distance since the US started trying to use it against the Vietnamese Communists, but I have no idea what the state of the art is. Can you use sonic technology?

I found an interesting link here in regards to that. It seems in regards to the tunnel problems underneath the 38th Parallel DMZ, narcotics shipping tunnels underneath the U.S. southern border, and the various tunnels and caves used by insurgents in places such as Afghanistan, the U.S. has been continuing plenty of research on this.

http://www.agu.org/meetings/sm06/sm0...m06_NS21A.html

The Text is pretty small though, fair warning. May need to copy-paste and use a larger text size to read it.

[kato13]

Originally Posted by Schone23666

The Text is pretty small though, fair warning. May need to copy-paste and use a larger text size to read it.

In most browsers <CTRL>+ will increase font size.

[natehale1971]

When i was in college, we had a student who was from South Korea, and they talked about the Army of the Republic of Korea having found tunnels that the North Koreans had been building... and that gave me the ideas of the use of tunnels as a delivery system for a nuclear device. Especially after reading all the materials about the underground nuclear testing.

that any underground explosion under a city, like Soul... would end up being the equvilent of a massive earthquake. And due to the things i've been reading about the construction problems of buildings in South Korea, there are still major buildings that have been built that would fall down with little effort from what i had read and gleaned from talkign with the South Korean student.

it doesn't sound like it'd be so destructive... but iif done the right way, it'd be really nasty and it could at first look like a natural disaster.