A primer course for internet generals- What War Between North Korea and the U.S. Might Look Like

[ThoughtCriminal]

15. Devices yes. Warheads - maybe not.

Okay the Trump appointee at DIA disagrees, but looking at the NK nuclear tests to date, I see little evidence that they can build a device that can be delivered in anything smaller than a railroad car. If you can fire a slug of plutonium into another chunk of Pu down a mine shaft with a big enough cannon to get it over 1 km/sec, you can get an inefficient, but very real nuclear explosion that will register on monitoring sites. But you can't take that design and mount on a missile.

If North Korea ever attacks the with a nuclear weapon, the delivery system is far more likely to be a jumbo shipping container than a ballistic missile.

Is the DIA assessment wrong? I don't know, but they admit to lots of gaps in the intelligence data and it seems to give North Korean claims rather than real knowledge. We have a long history of taking worst case estimates as reliable.

And then there is a difference between estimated existing vs. potential future capabilities.