They're just waiting around until China and Russia tells them they need the extra distraction. If NK starts attacking Japan/SK, expect China to follow with a Taiwan invasion shortly after.
“Nuclear powered” has no reference to their weapons capabilities, but instead how it generates electricity to run the ship.
Back in the old days, subs had diesel generators that required air to run the generators (like any fossil fuel powered engine) that recharged the batteries that powered the ship while submerged. That means that if the batteries were running low, the sub would need to surface to use the diesel engines to recharge the batteries so they could dive again. With the invention of nuclear powered subs, surfacing wasn’t needed except for replenishing breathing air. Which I think is like a few days or maybe a week or two. Or whatever, I’m not an expert on this.
Now, that’s not saying that a lot of nuclear powered subs don’t also carry nukes (like tridents, for example). But “nuclear powered sub” doesn’t have any bearing on that. It’s purely describing how the sub generates electricity.
I hope that any submariners that read this will correct me if I’m wrong. This is all based on info I read years ago.
I just re-watched all the first 14 Bond movies, and there are apparently satellites that can track all the subs, so we're good 😊👌 Also, you can just reprogram the missiles to blow up the other subs — just steal the launch codes, easy peasy 👍 Check mate, Kim! 💥🚀
Side note: many (or, indeed, most) of the films did not age well 😣 I'm not proud of how little of the misogyny, borderline rape-y, no-consent, belittling of women stuff I failed to notice as a kid (patents' fault) and adolescent (my fault); it starts to get a bit better around the end of the Moore era, and I'm now getting ready for the Dalton era. It will be interesting to see the newer films with this fresh context of the old ones, and I've never seen the two newest ones, which I think were supposed to address all of these issues.
Secondary side note: so far, the best ones (IMHO, YMMV) have been For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, A View To A Kill.
I don't know if this is done in practice, but if you have a nuclear powered sub, implementing a water electrolyzer that makes oxygen is fairly trivial. Then you have air as long as you have power, so they could in principle stay submerged for ≈ 20 years, or however long the nuclear reactors can go without refill.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
North Korea is putting its munitions industry and nuclear weapons sector on a war footing, following months of raised tensions with the U.S. and NATO-aligned countries in the region, a run of missile tests and border activity.
Earlier this month, North Korea launched a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the U.S., which Washington quickly condemned.
A spokesperson for North Korea's Defense Ministry said on December 17 that Washington and Seoul "are going to finish the end of the year with a preview of a nuclear war."
The "grave political and military situation" on and around the Korean peninsula "has reached its limit," the secretive country's leader, Kim Jong Un, said in readouts published by Pyongyang on Thursday.
"Clear is the intention of the U.S. which dispatched the nuclear-powered submarine Missouri to the Korean peninsula as soon as it hatched a dangerous plot for a nuclear war in Washington," North Korea's Defense Ministry said.
North Korean soldiers were present at numerous, previously out-of-use guard posts along the border between the two countries, Seoul's Defense Ministry said at the time.