Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

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Sure there is: Conventional artillery is slow. It'll pound Seoul into rubble given time but if they actually tried it, after the first 30 minutes, one of the superpowers would glass them.

Edit: Hmm. You lot make some good points about just how many 'small' hits they could pull off, assuming that each gun emplacement has ammo etc. so I did a bit more research. Seoul Capital Area has an area of ~11,000 kilometers square[0]. Assume a generous affected blast area of roughly a hectare per shell (we're talking about shelling a population center here so you don't have to level every building to have a serious impact) and that's 1.1 million shells (if they're firing with uniform distribution, which they won't be) to seriously damage the city. Assuming a normal distribution where they all aim haphazardly for the CBD and let fly, it's even worse, call it 500k shells at a guess.

10k emplacements, if they have 50 shells each, will deliver this in (as per post below) 8.3 minutes. So yeah, even if it can't "pound Seoul into rubble" it would be a highly undesirable outcome for the South Korean people.

I take it back. Conventional artillery isn't slow if you have enough of it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul_Capital_Area

If you can put literally thousands of HE shells on a target per minute - and if the NK gunners are even semi-competent, they can - you don't even need nuclear weapons.

Let's do the maths - I don't know about NK weapons but a NATO 155mm shell contains about 11kg of TNT. 10000 guns can deliver 110 tons of explosive in a single salvo. A British AS90 gun can deliver 6 rounds a minute, so assuming a similar rate, that's a kiloton in 90 seconds or 20 kilotons in the 30 minutes you suggest, or a Hiroshima in just over 20 minutes.

And don't forget artillery will be well dispersed and dug in, and the leadership will be in deep bunkers anywhere in the country. Who and where will you "glass"?

Estimates put their artillery deployment at 13,000. Even assuming they fire for a minute before being completely destroyed by counter battery fire, we're still talking 65,000 shells coming over the border. Push it out to 30 minutes and you've got 2m inbound shells.

is it safe to assume they would have 2 million shells available at once?

Given their extreme poverty, i would think their stockpile of ammo is rather skimpy (surely better invested in than other things in the country, but 2 million shells in 30 minutes sounds like it would be quite an economic outlay for them)

Their spending on armaments is probably one of the causes of the poverty in the general population.

That is exactly why they're justified in seeking a nuclear deterrence.

Imagine if Saddam, Assad, and Gaddafi (he stupidly gave whatever he had away to the country that later killed him) all had nukes and the capability to deliver them.

10000 conventional artillery pieces shelling for 30 minutes is a lot of shells.

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