North Korea News

[Smitty-48]

Because fishing vessels are constantly bumping up against Carrier Strike groups.

The quarantine zone around the carrier, as it passes through commercial chokepoints, which it has to do, is not as far as you apparently surmise, and well within the kill radius of a nuclear weapon, they just have to get close, they don't actually have to ram the carrier, and there are places all over the world, where you can get that close to a Carrier, particularly in the western Pacific, particularly with a commerical fishing vessel.

Certainly, they're going to send one of the escorts out to investigate a wayward fisherman, but if that fisherman is actually packing a 100 Kt bomb, it would already be too close by then.

[Alexander PhiAlipson]

You shouldn't be allowed to post this ingenious stuff, Smitty--they may be reading it in North Korea right now!

[DBTrek]

Indeed.

Inventing a "nuke mine" and dragging it via fishing trawler until a US carrier is "well within the kill radius of a nuclear weapon" seems like a much easier way of delivering the payload than say .. . simply launching a nuke at a ship.

I mean . . . why use optimal delivery systems when you can drag it underwater with a fishing boat, right? Why press a button when instead you can try to recruit a nuclear suicide crew and then pray that your cobbled-together nuke-mine-trawler plot pans out? All you need is a nuke mine, a suicide crew, a completely unobservant target, and a fishing vessel that can quietly speed up to "within nuclear blast radius" without drawing attention. Bravo.

I see it now.

How I missed the genius of the plan the first time is beyond me.

[TheReal_ND]

Because it's difficult to bring a missile launcher into a straight with paper plates on the boat.

[Smitty-48]

Simply launching a nuke at the ship is actually more difficult, first of all, they can't hit the carrier with a ballistic missile, a ballistic missile is not accurate enough, can't hit a moving target, so they would have to use a cruise missile, and a cruise missile is actually relatively easy to shoot down, whereas just driving the bomb out on a boat is actually a much easier way to get close, come in under the defenses rather than trying to fly through the teeth of them, and with the sophistication of commercial off the shelf automated navigation systems these days, no crew would even be required to execute the approach.

[Alexander PhiAlipson]

But they don't have to hit it, just get within its "blast range." Didn't they teach you this shit in ditch digging school?

[Speaker to Animals]

Carrier groups travel with ABM systems on a few cruisers.

The best way to do it, in my humble opinion, is using a few of those supercavetating torpedoes the Russians have. Those torpedoes actually fly pretty deep beneath the surface, at speeds faster than we can easily intercept. A few of those with nuclear warheads would do the job pretty easily.

I am unsure about their range. Range would have to be really far because we sweep pretty far around a carrier group and will hunt down subs within that range.

[TheReal_ND]

But they don't have to hit it, just get within its "blast range." Didn't they teach you this shit in ditch digging school?

[Smitty-48]

The ballistic missile has no targeting system, they can't see the carrier over the horizon, you have to go out and find the carrier, their nuclear strike platform has to be able to search, and then correct, line up for an intercept vector, the ballistic missiles the NK's have, these are not accurate, they would have trouble hitting a large stationary target, never mind a moving needle in a haystack like a ship at sea, if they tried to use a ballistic missile, it would miss by a huge margin, dozens of miles.

[DBTrek]

Sharks with laserbe. . .wait, no. no. That's ridiculous.
Fishing trawlers with nuke mines!!!