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North Korea Aspires to Threaten World with Retro-Soviet Nuclear Deterrent

After a mere two decades of tinkering and fussing, North Korea has apparently done enough restoration work to get one of its vintage Soviet-era submarines out to sea.
Photo by US Navy

North Korea is trying to rehab some ancient Russian missile submarines and develop some honest-to-goodness missiles to fire from them — missiles that the hermit kingdom could theoretically use to launch nuclear warheads at targets. Against all odds, it looks like North Korea's leaders are hell-bent on some day delivering on all the fiery poetry of their over-the-top threats of Armageddon.

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Last month, North Korea launched a modified version of a positively vintage Soviet nuclear missile sub. The Soviet Union's diesel-powered Golf-class submarines, made in the late 1950s and decommissioned in 1990, were sold to North Korea in 1994 for scrap. After a mere two decades of tinkering and fussing, they've apparently done enough restoration work to get one of those submarines out to sea.

That's a significant step forward in the country's quest to actually threaten the United States with fiery annihilation.

The only real challenges remaining for North Korea are the development of nuclear weapons small enough to mount on ballistic missiles, the creation of reliable missiles that can be fired from submarines, and the modification of submarines to be capable of launching these missiles — which, in terms of going from bullshit to reality, is a bit like me saying that I could make a killer ham and cheese omelet, if I had some ham, some cheese, some eggs, and knew how to make a killer omelet.

To be sure, it's pretty widely known that North Korea is adamant about working in all directions in its quest to enhance its nuclear deterrence. Similarly, it's pretty widely known that North Korea hasn't yet developed a nuclear deterrent capable of striking fear into the heart of its American arch-enemy.

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Even if North Korea is able to get a viable sea-based nuclear deterrent going after who knows how many more years of work, it'll be very rickety, low-rent, and slapdash. It will consist of a 40 or 50-year-old conventional diesel submarine without any air-independent propulsion, carrying a nuclear weapon of dubious reliability and lineage, riding atop an obsolete liquid-fuelled rocket with limited range. In the event of a conflict, that sub would be incredibly vulnerable to modern anti-submarine tactics.

When all is said and done, if this submarine won't last long in a conflict, then it presents North Korea with one of the trickier nuclear strategy questions: Is it better to use it or lose it? If North Korea's newly-modified sub turns out to be one of the few means it will ever have of striking at the US, then the country's leaders will have to decide whether it would it be better for them to use the nuke before the sub is sunk, or just resign themselves to losing such a long-sought after option of retaliating against the US mainland altogether.

Follow Ryan Faith on Twitter: @Operation_Ryan

Photo via US National Archives