In case you missed it, President Trump delivered a not-so-subtle address to the United Nations earlier this week.
And, as he stared at ambassadors from North Korea and Iran in the audience, he made a bold appeal to the UN to prepare for any measure necessary to stop both radical regimes.
As you might expect, Kim Jong Un — the ‘Rocket Man’ — didn’t take kindly to the suggestion by Trump that we might ‘totally destroy’ his little kingdom.
In response, he trotted out his foreign minister to the state-run media organ to threaten an atmospheric nuclear detonation.
In the immortal words of Joe Biden, that’s a “big effing deal.”
No above-ground nuclear test has been conducted for over thirty years, and the last one was at the hands of the communist Chinese.
If they make good on the threat, the war of words will absolutely escalate and the next action may be a decision from Gen. ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis.
Stay tuned.
Here’s more from Redstate…
Yesterday, the North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho issued a threat that North Korea might decide to carry out a nuclear test in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.
North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho suggested leader Kim Jong Un was considering testing “an unprecedented scale hydrogen bomb” over the Pacific in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat at the United Nations to “totally destroy” the country.
This would probably entail using either the Hwasong-12 (IRBM) or Hwasong-14 (ICBM), both of which have been tested in the last month, lofting their nuke a few hundred miles above a hopefully unoccupied piece of the North Pacific and detonating it.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
More than 500 nuclear tests have been conducted above ground around the world, according to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, but none since 1980. All of North Korea’s six nuclear tests have been held underground, the first in 2006 and the most recent on Sept. 3 this year.
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The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization says one of the worst nuclear-fallout events occurred when the U.S. detonated a hydrogen bomb on the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean in 1954. Hydrogen-based bombs, which rely on nuclear fusion, are more powerful than standard fission atomic weapons.Radioactive fallout from the 1954 explosion spread as far away as Europe. A crew of a fishing boat 90 miles away from ground zero suffered radiation poisoning, according to reports from the time.
…
Aboveground testing of nuclear weapons peaked in 1962, when the U.S. and Soviet Union held a combined total of more than 100 tests. Most testing switched to underground when the Partial Test Ban Treaty was introduced the next year.China was the last country to hold a nuclear test above ground, in a remote desert area in its far west in October 1980.
