Here’s What Would Happen If Donald Trump Nuked North Korea
By: Greg Fish
Tags: Tech, Politech, World, Politics, North Korea

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Maybe this is why so many Americans wonder why they can’t just nuke a country posing a risk to their security. With an arsenal of some 6,800 operational and precisely engineered warheads, it seems almost too appealing to end all your worries with the push of a button. But there’s a good reason why our nuclear posture isn’t determined by trigger-happy civilians eager to immolate enemy nations in radioactive hellfire. More than two decades of not having to think about nuclear annihilation seem to have created a bizarrely casual attitude about the, well, for lack of a better word, fallout from using nukes.

Maybe this is why Trump has been psychotically cavalier about the notion of starting a nuclear war lately. It’s as if we’ve time-traveled to 1950 when the Korean War gave Douglas MacArthur the idea to nuke China in response for intervening with his forces, an idea that was rebuffed as not to invite Russian use of nuclear weapons in otherwise conventional conflicts, and ultimately cost the general his job after he went rogue and tried to defy Truman’s orders on the subject. Just like MacArthur, Trump seems unable to grasp the real world consequences of deploying humanity’s deadliest invention on a whim.

Nuclear weapons are not just big bombs that create huge fireballs and level a large territory. On top of the terrifying geopolitical implications, they come with some very nasty side-effects that are impossible to contain, especially if they’re ever used in bulk. But before we get into the details, a primer on how these weapons work and how this influences fallout seems in order. We’ll use the American W88 warhead as our example, the 450 kiloton thermonuclear device on standby today, and seemingly a close analog to North Korea’s last unveiled design according to the experts.

The W88 is an implementation of the Teller-Ulam design, named after the duo of academics who came up with the concept for the thermonuclear warheads we know and fear today, though their collaboration wasn’t exactly friendly. The overall idea is to put the core of a fission device, much like the ones that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and use the heat, radiation, and pressure of the initial fission blast to trigger the ignition of a radioactive spark plug which would fuse two isotopes of hydrogen into helium. The fission device would be the primary, logically making the fuel for the subsequent fusion reaction the secondary, which is how they’re referred to in all designs.

While the isotopes in question — deuterium, distilled from water, and tritium, created when the neutrons from the fission blast bombard lithium-6 in the warhead — are the same for every thermonuclear design, the W88 features a rather interesting, and very relevant twist. Most of its explosive yield comes from its unusual, egg-shaped fission primary, meant to help miniaturize the warhead so multiple bombs could be fitted on a single missile. This way, it could be delivered using MIRVs, or Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles, making attempts to intercept it by an enemy state fiendishly difficult.