#NorthKorea #NuclearWar #Simulation #WhatIf #Geopolitics #NuclearBomb #Survival #WorldCrisis
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00:00It's the dead of night, and North Korea is about to fire a missile carrying a nuclear bomb.
00:05If the American shield fails, an entire city gets wiped out.
00:10Technicians rip the camouflage off a bunker dug into a mountain just over 100 miles from the Chinese border.
00:17A truck backs out carrying a Hwasong-15, a missile that can flatten several square miles of a city.
00:24An officer picks up a wired phone.
00:26On the other end, Kim Jong-un only has to say one word, and the system meant to stop.
00:33It has hit its target barely more than half the time in real tests.
00:37The launch hangs on a single word, and the line that word travels down is buried under the mountain.
00:43There's no radio and no communications satellite involved.
00:47It's an old-school cable laid on purpose because a line that transmits no signal can't be intercepted.
00:53But for that word to matter, the missile has to stay put, and nobody in space can see anything move.
00:59That's why the technicians work fast and in silence.
01:03They know spy satellites pass over the mountain, photographing every corner of the area.
01:08And a truck hauling a missile out in the open is exactly what they're looking for.
01:13Tonight, though, clouds blanket the sky and it's pitch dark.
01:17The people running this operation have waited for a night just like it.
01:21The camouflage that hid the bunker entrance lies on the ground, rolled up in a rush, and the mouth of
01:27the mine is left open to the cold air.
01:30What comes out is hard to believe, given its size.
01:34The mine was converted to hide this missile.
01:36The truck backs out with it lying on the platform.
01:40It's over 65 feet long, longer than an articulated bus.
01:44You can't move a vehicle like that in broad daylight without someone photographing it.
01:48And every yard it travels outside the rock is another chance to give itself away.
01:54The drivers inch forward, guided by hand signals, until it's in the exact position.
02:00But getting it out of the mine solves nothing.
02:03The missile still doesn't have permission to fire.
02:05The launch officer stays by the phone, receiver in hand, eyes locked on the clock.
02:12That phone is a direct line to Kim Jong-un.
02:16And the technology is outdated on purpose, because nobody can tap a cable that only exists underground.
02:23If the leader hesitates, or the line goes dead, the missile stays where it is, and the perfect night is
02:29wasted.
02:30But the call goes through.
02:32And what comes down the line is a single word.
02:35No frills, no debate.
02:38Enough to set everything else in motion.
02:41From that moment, the priority changes completely.
02:45It's no longer about hiding the missile, but surviving its ignition.
02:49The Hwasong-15 runs on liquid fuel.
02:52And at ignition, fuel like that can turn into a fireball that takes out the truck, the platform, and everyone
03:00standing nearby.
03:02The technicians know it well, so each of them runs to their post the moment the officer hangs up the
03:08phone.
03:09Some of the crew lie down behind blast shields, built for exactly this.
03:13Others lock themselves in an armored cabin, eyes on the instruments, hands well away from any lever.
03:22Inside the cabin, nobody speaks.
03:24A fault in the fuel pump, or a valve, however small, wouldn't just cause a delay.
03:29It would cause an explosion that levels the entire complex and gives away its position to space.
03:35The seconds of waiting stretch out as the indicators turn green one by one.
03:42And then the main engine ignites.
03:45The roar shakes the whole installation.
03:48The shields rattle.
03:50The ground trembles under the technicians lying flat.
03:53An orange glow floods the mine entrance.
03:56Two seconds later, the missile lifts off.
03:59From inside the complex, nobody can tell whether the camouflage did its job,
04:03and they have no way of knowing what's now overhead.
04:07Low clouds and a dark night have fooled every eye that could look up from below.
04:11And the technicians seem to think they're safe.
04:15But the night and the clouds don't fool everyone, because someone is watching from much higher up.
04:21America's early warning satellites don't need to see the missile.
04:25They only need to feel its heat.
04:27Five seconds after liftoff, with clouds still covering the sky over the mountain,
04:32and nobody on the surface having seen a thing,
04:35one of them detects a column of heat that wasn't there an instant before.
04:40It sends an immediate alert to the 2nd Space Warning Squadron at Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado,
04:47and to commands across every military region.
04:51A liquid fuel engine at full ignition releases so much energy that it stands out in infrared from space.
04:57And the dark night that shielded the truck is useless against a sensor that doesn't look at light.
05:03But a single alert isn't enough to move an army, and one sensor can be wrong.
05:08There was already a false missile alarm caused by a glitch in the Soviet warning system.
05:14So at 7 seconds, a second satellite comes into play, in geostationary orbit about 22,000 miles from Earth,
05:21and confirms the same heat signature.
05:24Clouds hide the launch, but not the heat.
05:27And now two separate sensors agree.
05:30But a heat signature only says something is burning and rising, not what it is.
05:35A rocket carrying a satellite or a missile that can cross an ocean?
05:40That answer decides which defenses go active, and who gets called first.
05:45So the satellites compare the signature to a library of known launches,
05:49checking its intensity and how it grows, and in under a second, they know.
05:54It's a Hwasong-15, just like the one North Korea tested in 2017.
06:00So far, machines have done everything in under a minute,
06:03and now it's up to people to make sure they haven't made a mistake.
06:07At the Space Force, analysts freeze as the alerts start stacking up on their screens,
06:12one after another, and they dive in to check the data by hand.
06:15Nobody wants to call a launch real and be wrong,
06:18and nobody wants to be the one who confirmed it too late.
06:22The machines have decided, but the humans need time to verify,
06:26and the missile won't wait.
06:29At 30 seconds, it's at twice a jet's cruising altitude and still climbing.
06:34At last, at 45 seconds, verification ends, and the launch is confirmed as real.
06:41An emergency warning goes out to forces in South Korea and the Pacific,
06:45and a short message arrives over the hotline to the Pentagon and the White House.
06:50North Korea has fired a ballistic missile, possibly with a nuclear warhead.
06:55What nobody knows is where it's headed,
06:57and that decides which city has to brace to disappear.
07:01Nobody knows yet where it's going,
07:03and the message has just reached Washington,
07:06where the president knows nothing yet,
07:08and is the only one who can give the orders.
07:11The president is in the middle of a meeting with the leader of an allied country,
07:15and in the hallway,
07:16an aide holding the message has no idea how to interrupt,
07:20while the missile keeps climbing.
07:22At 60 seconds after liftoff, the missile's main engine runs out of fuel.
07:28Explosive bolts separate the first stage, which falls away as an empty cylinder,
07:32and a second later, the second stage ignites to push the missile out of the atmosphere.
07:37Every passing second takes it farther from the ground and closer to space,
07:41where there's no air to slow it down.
07:43In Washington, it's early afternoon.
07:46The two leaders keep talking in a room where nobody interrupts,
07:49ever, until an aide walks through the door without knocking.
07:53He leans toward the president, whispers in his ear,
07:56and when the president is slow to react, practically drags him out of the room.
08:00Out in the hallway, he tells him what just came in over the hotline.
08:04North Korea has launched a nuclear strike, and no one knows the target yet.
08:09The allied leader sits there, call cut off mid-sentence.
08:13The president rushes down to the situation room and asks what can be done right now.
08:18The answer, almost nothing.
08:21While it climbs, it's at its most vulnerable, big, slow, and lit up like a torch.
08:27But that's worthless if there's no weapon that can reach it.
08:30At this stage, all you can do is watch and gather data.
08:34So that's what they do.
08:36On the room's screens, radar stations in South Korea and Japan,
08:41and the radars on ships deployed in the area link up into a single network
08:45that tracks the missile without losing it.
08:47Each one adds a piece of the trajectory,
08:49and together they draw a line stretching across the map as the missile climbs and speeds up.
08:55But a line stops nothing.
08:57Radars show where it is and how fast it's rising.
09:01Analysts can extend the curve forward, but that still leaves far too many possible destinations.
09:06Lines stretch towards Seoul, Tokyo, Guam, Hawaii, and the mainland.
09:11No one in the room knows if Washington is on that list, and the Secret Service isn't waiting to find
09:16out.
09:18As radars keep tracking the curve, agents prepare to move the President to a classified location.
09:24If the White House is the target, he has under 40 minutes to get out.
09:28The President knows it, and he knows that every decision he makes from now on, he'll make with the missile
09:34still climbing.
09:36Right now, at bases and aboard ships across the Pacific, some batteries are about to wake up.
09:42What can the United States do against a missile that's already in the air?
09:46Two minutes after launch, its four shields begin to switch on, each protecting a different piece of the map.
09:52First to wake up are the THAAD batteries in South Korea, Guam, and Hawaii.
09:57Their radars start sweeping the sky, and the launchers swivel toward the bearing something could come from.
10:03But each battery only defends the zone it's been assigned, and the missile doesn't pass over any of them.
10:09So for now, their radars stare at a sky with nothing to shoot down.
10:13It's much the same with the Patriots.
10:15The ones at Pacific bases go on alert, alongside the Aegis destroyers carrying SM-3 missiles.
10:22And all of these are short-range defenses.
10:24They can only intercept the warhead on the way down, when it's already falling on its target.
10:30On top of that, one of these ships covers several bases or naval groups at once.
10:34And if the missile is headed somewhere else, that destroyer can't do a thing.
10:38That leaves the fourth, the long-range one.
10:41Northern Command activates mid-course defense.
10:44About 44 interceptors split between Fort Greeley in Alaska and Vandenberg in California.
10:49They're designed to hit the warhead in space before it enters its final phase.
10:54Though in real tests, they've hit barely more than half the time.
10:58But using them takes information.
11:01An interceptor flies to a pre-computed intercept point,
11:05and without knowing where the warhead is headed, that point doesn't exist yet.
11:09So everything on screen hinges on a curve refined second by second.
11:14Each new altitude and speed reading narrows the possible target.
11:19And at three minutes, the trajectory rules out South Korean, Guam, and Japanese forces as the target.
11:25The batteries that had just powered up there stop being the ones that matter.
11:29Hawaii is still on the list.
11:32And so is the rest of the country, with cities of millions that have no shield anywhere near.
11:37Then comes the doubt nobody wants.
11:39North Korea has fired test missiles before, and spending the costliest shield on a drill would be shooting blind.
11:46But waiting has a price too.
11:48At 3.15, the president hears it.
11:50Trajectory, speed, this is no test.
11:53It's real, headed for Hawaii or the West Coast.
11:55He authorizes the interceptors and orders ships to shelter.
11:59And at bases all across the country, the planes that ensure someone can keep giving orders are starting to lift
12:09off.
12:11The East Coast would also fall within their reach, though without the precision needed to single out one specific city.
12:22The president authorizes the interceptors and orders the ships to take cover.
12:26And that permission is the only thing he has in hand.
12:30But authorizing isn't firing.
12:32The 44 interceptors still don't know where the warhead will land with the precision they need.
12:38And the missile keeps climbing at a speed no regional shield can reach.
12:42Meanwhile, at bases across the country, crews run toward aircraft that already have their engines ready.
12:49At four minutes, with America's nuclear triad still at rest, a fleet of modified jumbo jets takes off from several
12:58bases, and they won't land until the crisis is over.
13:01On the outside, they look like passenger planes.
13:04But inside, they're packed with communications gear and hardened against electromagnetic pulses.
13:10That's the blast that fries the electronics of everything it hits on the ground.
13:14They climb very high and spread out over the West Coast, the East Coast, and the middle of the country.
13:20And tanker aircraft keep them fueled so they can stay airborne as long as it takes.
13:25If a rain of missiles falls on Washington, the president is left with no office and no bunker.
13:31And these planes are built so orders keep flowing from the sky.
13:35But that plan only works if the attack is the one we can see.
13:39And right now, nobody can guarantee that.
13:41With a possible nuclear missile in the air, the United States also has to watch the other nuclear powers.
13:47And that vigilance starts with readying its own arsenal.
13:51So at 4.30, the entire nuclear triad goes on alert.
13:56Troops around the world are notified, and aircraft and nuclear munitions are prepared.
14:01And the ballistic missile submarines begin their own preparations on the ocean floor, where no satellite can see them.
14:09Meanwhile, hundreds of miles up, the missile continues on its path.
14:15Around five minutes in, the second stage burns out, and the warhead separates from the rocket that carried it there.
14:22Using small chemical thrusters, it corrects its course.
14:25And from that moment on, it flies without an engine at about four miles per second.
14:30No defense can stop it in this phase.
14:33All that's left is refining the calculation of where it will land.
14:37A calculation that changes with every new radar reading.
14:42The analysts have been waiting minutes for this moment, because a warhead with no engine can't hide anything.
14:48Its path depends only on the speed and altitude it left with.
14:53And those numbers finally arrive at five minutes.
14:56With them, Hawaii is ruled out.
14:59The likely impact is the southern west coast.
15:02At Vandenberg, California, four interceptors power up and start receiving live data.
15:09But they can't launch yet.
15:11The missile has to get closer.
15:13And nobody knows whether the president will still be in Washington when it does.
15:17At the White House, the president has just rushed out of the situation room.
15:21With two people glued to him, one carrying a briefcase.
15:26Air Force One and the Frontier.
15:29You're the president of the United States.
15:31And six minutes after launch, you sprint across the White House lawn toward the Marine One helicopter.
15:37The nuclear football is already with you.
15:39And the second aide carries a communications backpack that will keep you connected at all times to the government and
15:46the armed forces.
15:47If that connection is cut, the country will have an attack underway and nobody to obey.
15:52Inside the helicopter comes a decision that allows no consultation.
15:57There's a shelter designed for a situation like this.
16:00The place anyone would expect them to put you.
16:02You'd rather board Air Force One.
16:05You'd judge the risk of a massive nuclear attack to be low.
16:09And from the air, you'd be safe from the effects of a ground blast while still talking to command.
16:14It's a gamble.
16:15And you make it alone.
16:17If the calculation is wrong, there won't be a second chance to fix it.
16:21But while you climb aboard a plane, the military can't wait for you to decide anything more.
16:27If the missile really does carry a bomb, the response has to be ready before anyone knows where it lands.
16:34And that response starts on the Korean Peninsula.
16:38At seven minutes, U.S. and South Korean special forces assemble and rush to the armories.
16:44They've been ready for a while given the tension of recent years.
16:48And their mission is to infiltrate North Korean nuclear facilities and neutralize them from the inside.
16:54To get there, they have modified Black Hawk helicopters built to evade radar and fly quieter than any other.
17:02Their aircraft made to enter a country at night without anyone hearing them come.
17:07But there's a problem no plan can solve.
17:10Nobody has given them the order to go yet.
17:12As long as the missile is in the air, nobody knows if this is an isolated attack or the start
17:18of a war.
17:19And sending helicopters into a nuclear armed country could turn a single warhead into the entire conflict.
17:25So they wait with engines ready and no permission to use them.
17:29At 7.30, alert fighters take off and troops deployed along the demilitarized zone move into position.
17:36And then a siren sounds in Seoul.
17:40If hostilities break out, North Korea can shell the capital from behind a border less than 30 miles away.
17:46With thousands of rounds per minute raining down on about 10 million people.
17:52Between those bases and those streets, there are also thousands of American troops exposed from the very first minute.
17:59That means the missile climbing toward the Pacific isn't the only problem today.
18:04Nobody on the peninsula knows whether it's Kim Jong-un's opening move or his only one.
18:10Or how many minutes the city has before someone fires the second.
18:14And while you're still in the air, with the briefcase close and the backpack open,
18:19everything now hangs on a math problem that computers have to solve before the missile gets too close.
18:25The Interceptors
18:27At 8 minutes, a computer has to calculate where the warhead will be more than 10 minutes from now.
18:33Because that's the only way to collide with it before it falls on an American city.
18:38At 8 minutes, the supercomputers finish calculating the warhead's trajectory, altitude, and speed, and produce a firing solution.
18:46The launch order goes out right away, because against an object falling at about 4 miles per second,
18:52the only thing that works is hitting it head-on.
18:55Four Interceptors roar out of their silos at Vandenberg, California.
18:59The computers don't aim them where the warhead is at that moment, because they'd arrive at an empty sky.
19:05They steer them to the point where it, and they will cross paths several minutes from now.
19:09And they carry no explosives.
19:11The Interceptor's head slams into the warhead and destroys it with pure kinetic energy.
19:16That's why four are launched.
19:18With that hit rate, firing just one would be flipping a coin over a city.
19:22Once out of the silos, nobody can correct them.
19:25And as they climb, in Guam, Japan, and South Korea, crews run to their aircraft.
19:31First out would be the F-15s and F-16s, to win control of the air.
19:35But the B-2 stealth bombers, the best suited to penetrate enemy territory, are almost all in Missouri unprepared.
19:42So the B-52s get readied, which need at least an hour of prep, and could only strike within the
19:48day.
19:49At 12 minutes, the Interceptors are already in space.
19:53They've shed the stages that carried them up, and all they have left are small chemical thrusters for minor corrections.
20:00If the firing solution was bad, they can't fix it.
20:04They'll miss by miles.
20:06Plan B is the Aegis ships, but they only get a shot in the final seconds of the fall, with
20:11no room for a second try.
20:14Until then, nobody knows which city the warhead will hit.
20:18The radars have been feeding data for minutes, and with no engine, every reading rules out more of the map.
20:25At 12.30, the updated data reaches the Situation Room, and points to a probable target.
20:30Los Angeles, a city of about 4 million people.
20:34Until then, it was a dot on a map, and now it has a name, streets, and people who don't
20:39know they have only minutes left.
20:41And with a name on the table, the President decides not to wait for the result of the collision to
20:45start responding.
20:47At 13 minutes, the United States has already begun attacking North Korea, and it still doesn't know if it stopped
20:54the first missile.
20:55But in space, the warhead is about to split into eight pieces.
20:59The first wave of special forces takes off in modified Blackhawks, headed for several North Korean launch sites.
21:06At the same time, fighter bombers, based in South Korea, head out toward other targets.
21:11The reason is to prevent a second strike.
21:14Nobody knows for sure how many warheads North Korea has, maybe close to 50, and every launcher still standing could
21:21target another city.
21:23At 13.30 from Air Force One, the President asks Congress for a formal declaration of war on North Korea.
21:29The request comes with the missile still in space, over a country already under fire, and no one knows if
21:36the city it claims to defend will survive.
21:39America has gone to war without knowing whether it will lose a city this very morning.
21:43But up in space, the radars are just starting to notice something.
21:47At 14.12, the warhead splits into eight fragments, releasing a cloud of chaff, metallic confetti that blinds radar.
21:55Until then, they'd been tracking a single point, falling along a known curve.
22:00Now they see a cloud of echoes, moving almost identically, and each piece could be the warhead or a decoy.
22:07The interceptors already crossing space can only make small corrections, so aiming well is pointless if they aim at the
22:14wrong piece.
22:14So which of the eight carries the bomb?
22:17Answering that falls to the TPY-2 radars and the sea-based X-band radar, and their job is to
22:23separate the warhead from the decoys to guide the interceptors.
22:27They process every measurement at once, piece by piece, and compare how each one moves.
22:32If they get it wrong, the interceptor will chase a fake object while the real warhead keeps heading for the
22:39coast.
22:40Judging by North Korea's largest nuclear test, the bomb it carries would unleash many times the energy of the Hiroshima
22:47bomb over a city of millions.
22:50Those millions have no way of knowing what's being decided up there.
22:54The radar operators do, and they're working against a clock that runs in tenths of a second,
22:59because every second they take to pinpoint the target is one less second of flight for the interceptors.
23:05But the radar's work has an advantage North Korea didn't foresee.
23:09With very precise measurements, the operators rule out the decoys one by one.
23:14Since the regime has little experience with multiple warheads and decoys, the fakes don't behave in space like a real
23:20warhead.
23:21At 15.02, the interceptors release their kill vehicles.
23:25Six minutes remain until impact.
23:26And while the interceptors' clock ticks down, another army is on the move that Washington hasn't seen.
23:32The final minute.
23:33At 16 minutes, every screen in the Situation Room is locked on a single blip in space,
23:38and nobody is watching what's happening over the North Korean border.
23:42There, the Blackhawks fly in the dark.
23:45They took off three minutes ago, bound for Kim Jong-un's arsenals,
23:49with orders to arrive before anyone uses any of his roughly 50 warheads.
23:53Nobody in Washington can warn them of anything, because the room only has eyes for the missile.
23:58Up above, the problem is of a different kind.
24:01Since 15.02, the kill vehicles have been flying alone, and no room in the world can send them an
24:07order anymore.
24:08With their own sensors, they have to find the one piece that matters among the remnants of the chaff cloud.
24:13And if they pick the wrong object, there won't be time to correct.
24:17At 20.30, the kill vehicles close in at over 3,700 miles per hour.
24:22At that speed, every second of delay is more than a mile of difference, and an error of just a
24:28few is enough to miss.
24:29The real-world tests of this system, with barely more than half hits, reassure no one.
24:35This is the point where the decisions end.
24:37The calculation is done, the interceptors are on their way, and nobody can do anything now.
24:44On Air Force One, the President faces a countdown, and no order to give, and can only wait for the
24:49call that tells him which of the two things happened.
24:52At 21.05, the kill vehicles reach the crossing point, with the warhead at over 3,700 miles per hour.
25:00And the radars begin to measure how long until the first collision.
25:03At 21.09, the third one hits its target, in a collision at about 10,000 miles per hour, and
25:10a flash.
25:11The impact doesn't trigger a nuclear explosion, because that requires a precise chain of events.
25:16At 21.40, the radars confirm it.
25:19Two misses and one hit.
25:20Threat neutralized.
25:22At 22 minutes, the President gets the news, and he doesn't return to the White House because another attack is
25:27still possible.
25:28Meanwhile, more than a thousand North Korean artillery pieces begin shelling Southern forces, and the Blackhawks discover they aren't the
25:36only ones in the air.
25:37Oh, since the 16-minute mark, Chinese helicopters carrying rapid reaction forces have crossed the border with the same objective.
25:45Seize Kim's arsenal before it's used again.
25:48Nobody has said who fires first if both armies meet over the same facility.
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