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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1952 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 18, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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There's more to it than just throwing together some plutonium for warheads. You really want hydrogen bombs for good yields, lower mass and higher cost-efficiency, they're less irradiating too. You need a secure delivery mechanism, long range missiles of the kind Japan isn't supposed to have. You need warhead miniaturization for practicality. Gravity bombs won't be all that useful - why would you need to use nuclear weapons if you have that kind of air superiority? It'd take a while to turn a technical nuclear weapon capability into practical nuclear arms.

The Israelis and Israeli-adjacent media have been fearmongering that Iran is months away from nuclear weapons for the last 20-30 years, nobody knows the real status of the Iranian nuclear program except the Iranians. Iran nuclearizing induces ugly dynamics, Saudi nuclearization amongst other things.

You need a secure delivery mechanism, long range missiles of the kind Japan isn't supposed to have.

Point of order: Japan already has long-range missiles that, as today's events have demonstrated, can accurately deliver a payload to targets roughly 400,000km away. It is as trivial to make a missile of that sort deliver a payload onto an arbitrary spot on the Earth as it is to deliver a car to an arbitrary orbit.

The Iranian space program is... a bit less developed by comparison.

Your average space-rocket makes a poor long range missile. They're extremely big and obvious targets, not protected in siloes or road-mobile. They take a long time to be readied for firing, many are liquid fuelled and need that to be pumped in. I'd imagine they'd have absolutely enormous radar signatures and would be relatively slow by ICBM standards - ideal targets for missile defence.

The Iranians have real experience firing off long-range missile into contested airspace, combatting missile defence. They have a lot of missiles and launchers, hidden and defensible.

I have no doubt that Japan has the technical capacity to produce long-range missiles but there's more to establishing practical capabilities than converting civilian rockets.

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