WashPost: NKorea Has Mini Nuke Warheads for ICBMs

[kidd]

Of course, building a nuke that is 1,100 pounds isn't the problem. 

Do they and a reentry vehicle to put it in?  Without one, the bomb burns up in reentry.

Do they have a trigger mechanism that will cause the bomb to explode *BEFORE* it hits the ground? Without one, the bomb will fragment into pieces when it goes *smush* against the ground.

Good post.

As part of my grad school work, I had to redesign the Mercury program re-entry shield.
This is very difficult. And I haven't seen anything in the news about North Korea testing re-entry vehicles. So there is still time.

Eventually, they will solve this issue.
At this point, the United States should be testing its anti-missile missiles on the North Korean missiles so that the Norks cannot get any data from potential re-entry vehicle tests.

Perhaps this should be discussed at the UN, rather than more useless sanctions.

[Ghost Bear]

Of course, building a nuke that is 1,100 pounds isn't the problem. 

Do they and a reentry vehicle to put it in?  Without one, the bomb burns up in reentry.

Do they have a trigger mechanism that will cause the bomb to explode *BEFORE* it hits the ground? Without one, the bomb will fragment into pieces when it goes *smush* against the ground.

True, but... if you're going for an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) effect, then you don't care about re-entry or a fancy triggering mechanism, since the most effective EMP happens when the explosion happens at very high altitude over your target. So, all the NORKs would have to do is fly the missile above the atmosphere over the continental US, and then set it off, which wouldn't require anything more than a simple radio signal.

Also, as my wife has pointed out, no one seems to be talking about the possibility of the NORKs producing and selling one or more nukes to another "bad actor", such as Iran or ISIS, and that entity then smuggling the nukes on container ships into US ports and setting them off, either via timers or cell-phone triggers, as they do with conventional IEDs.