Korea Raises Nuclear Stakes over Sanctions: Hydrogen Bomb Test

NORTH Korea has again raised the stakes in its game of nuclear poker by threatening to test a hydrogen bomb that would be even more powerful than a nuclear device. The new high card has been played by North Korea's unofficial spokesman in Tokyo, Kim Myong-chol, who, aside from threatening an even bigger bomb as a "countermeasure", said that another nuclear test was the thing that "first comes to mind".

It is news bound to rattle regional leaders who are rapidly running out of aces. The leaders of South Korea and China will meet today in Beijing about North Korea, their first face-to-face meeting since Monday's nuclear test. Mr Kim's choice of words was in line with the comments of a senior North Korean diplomat who also spoke darkly of "countermeasures" particularly aimed at Japan. "The specific contents will become clear if you keep watching. We never speak empty words," said North Korea's ambassador for diplomatic normalisation with Japan, Song Il-ho, in an interview yesterday with Japan's Kyodo News Agency in Pyongyang.

North Korea was angered by a new round of economic sanctions imposed by Japan that amount to a virtual trade blockade. The measures ban North Korean ships, imports and travel visas and come on top of earlier sanctions on commercial ties and financial transactions. It will have the effect of cutting North Korea's access to its third biggest market, according to government officials in Tokyo.

Mr Song said that Tokyo's sanctions hurt more than others because Japan had never atoned for its colonisation of the Korean Peninsula between 1920 and 1945 and that was a factor that would be "calculated in" as Pyongyang planned its retribution, he said. The reference to "colonisation" would be read like a code by left-wing nationalists in South Korea, according to Robert Dujarric, a Tokyo-based senior associate with the National Institute of Public Policy in Virginia.

"One of the goals of North Korea is to convince South Korea that they are standing up to the ugly Japanese colonialists and so North Korean nationalism is always covered with a Japanese face," Dr Dujarric said. By undermining support in Seoul, North Korea would lower the risk of severe sanctions from South Korea, which is its biggest source of aid and trade.

Japan's Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, ordered a special meeting on the consequences of the economic sanctions on Japanese businesses, including on fish and vegetable importers who buy unusual crab, mushroom and ginseng varieties from North Korean suppliers.

US President George Bush, speaking after Japan announced plans for extra sanctions, said: "In response to North Korea's actions we're working with our partners … to ensure there are serious repercussions for the regime in Pyongyang." China, the nearest North Korea has to an ally, has condemned its communist neighbour and backs limited sanctions, but diplomats said it sees the US approach as too stringent. "One can say that punishment isn't the goal," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said yesterday, saying any sanctions would be to coax North Korea back to talks.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister John Howard warned that using military force against North Korea's "seriously crazy regime" could not be ruled out. Mr Howard said the North Korea situation was very bad and a huge problem for the whole world and the options for dealing with it were very limited. "Nobody wants to look at military options," he told Sydney radio. "You can't take them off the table, you never do that, that's foolish, but nobody really wants to look at that as an option."

Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen. An isotope is any of several different forms of an element each having different atomic mass. Isotopes of an element have nuclei with the same number of protons (the same atomic number) but different numbers of neutrons. Therefore, isotopes have different mass numbers, which give the total number of nucleons - the number of protons plus neutrons. Isotopes and nuclides are specified by the name of the particular element, implicitly giving the atomic number, followed by a hyphen and the mass number (e.g. helium-3, carbon-12, carbon-14, iodine-131 and uranium-238). In symbolic form, the number of nucleons is denoted as a superscripted prefix to the chemical symbol (e.g. ¹²C, ¹⁴C, ¹³¹I and ²³⁸U).

Deuterium occurs in trace amounts naturally as deuterium gas, written symbolicaly ²H₂, but most natural occurrence in the universe is bonded with a typical ¹H atom, a gas called hydrogen deuteride (¹H²H).

Deuterium behaves chemically similarly to ordinary hydrogen, but there are differences in bond energy and length for compounds of heavy hydrogen isotopes which are larger than the isotopic differences in any other element. Bonds involving deuterium and tritium are somewhat stronger than the corresponding bonds in light hydrogen, and these differences are enough to make significant changes in biological reactions.

Anyways, the problem wasn't so much with deuterium, but with tritium contaminatin.

Deuterium is indeed wonderful stuff from a nuclear bomb maker's perspective, but by squirting tritium instead of deuterium into the Hohlraum at the moment of ignition, larger quantities of neutrons could be generated in order to boost the normal fission reaction (by a factor of five to 40). Such reaction could even blast neutrons into another tritium supply, and thereby cause a fusion reaction.

In simple terms, neutrons are the stuff of atom bombs. When they're liberated from their host atoms, they radiate outwards bombarding other atomic nuclei, causing them to fission and thereby release even more neutrons. Hydrogen isn't supposed to have any neutrons (albeit the deuterium hydrogen isotope does have one/I>), let alone the two that tritium contains.

The nucleus of tritium contains one proton and two neutrons, whereas the nucleus of protium (the most abundant hydrogen isotope) contains no neutrons. It is a molecular gas (T₂ or ³H₂) at standard temperature and pressure. Tritium combines with oxygen to form a liquid called tritiated water T₂O or partially tritiated THO.

³₁T ==> ³₂He⁺ + e ^- + v_e

This reaction releases about 18.6 KeV of energy with the electron carrying an average kinetic energy of 6.5 keV, and the remaining energy being carried off undetectably by the electron antineutrino. As such, the low energy decay particles emitted creates a difficulty in detecting tritium labelled compounds except through the use of liquid scintillation counting.

The means of mass producing tritium are by placing Lithium-Aluminum into a nuclear reactor and allowing the thermal neutron flux to irradiate and transform the Li into tritium. By extracting the small faceted bubbles inside the metal, one can concentrate the tritium these bubbles contain. The Germans did this at the Greifswald plant.

Since that's a pretty high-tech and resource intensive process, the source of the tritium undoubtedly came from the former DDR nuclear program. Although the German nuclear plants were under international inspection, they did manage to circumvent some plutonium inspections, and there's no international controls on tritium at all. Concealing tritium production would be child's play (such as smuggled into the country via NiH batteries - virtually undetectable to scrutiny).

The most likely reason that DPRK's recent alleged nuclear test was probably a "fizzle", is that the bomb engineer was shot in the back of the head at 1m range prior explaining the proceedure for extraction of the tritium from the NiH batteries containing it. While the process is somewhat delicate, it is nevertheless pretty straightfoward: heating of the batteries would release the tritium (something any university student of nuclear science would be capable of performing).

However, since tritium is inherently unstable on a nuclear level it decays radioactively into ³₂He⁺. It has a half-life of about 12.3 years, and therefore, it would've been necessary to filter out the significant quantity of He-3 decay products in order to ensure pure tritium could be introduced into the bomb at the moment of ignition. Filtering the tritium through a thin block of palladium would've easily separated out the ³He from the tritium.

The fact of the matter is that the head of DPRK's bomb program was in fact an ex-DDR nuclear scientist, and while brilliant and meticulous to a fault, was the stereotypical arrogant, egotistical German and quite impertinent towards the Illustrious Leader of North Korea. Therefor, once the final assembly process had been completed, the mastermind had been quite simply neutralized. Besides, he knew too much about where the bodies where buried with respect to the international aspects of the DPRK (and others) nuclear program(s). However, he was snuffed prior to imparting this last bit of fairly critical imformation, and as such the bomb's operation depended upon hardly any worse material imaginable.

The net result was that the intensely neutron-starved-³He-poisoned-tritium trapped over 2/7th of all the high-energy neutrons emitted from the Primary in useless reactions. Albeit, while the following reaction did occur to some extent:

n + ³He ==> ³H + ¹H + 0.764 MeV,

and some tritium was generated as a result, that process is strongly spin dependent, i.e., spin-polarized Helium-3 allows the transmission of neutrons having one spin component, while absorbing the other spin-component species of neutron. While 1/2 of the scavanged high-energy neutrons essentially are allowed a get-out-of-jail-free card, 50% of the remaining half are either converted into utterly worthlessly stable ⁴He, and so about 25% are then caught in the above reaction. In any event, even so tritium is created out of the ³He poison, no additional neutrons are generated by 2/7th of the neutrons emitted from the Primary. This is very fatally bad for any aspiring nuclear chain reaction. Very very very bad in fact. Most reactions of this type "fizzle", instead this one "foomped".

This should be a lesson to everybody: do not "off" your main science dweebs before (at the very least) the evil weapon has been proven proof in concept, and secondly, don't buy evil-havengod(sp?)-weapons supplies/components from has-been science-dweebs foreign nationals of has-been Soviet bloc countries that you're employing that you plan to snuff out before they come through. I think that pretty much sums it up.

I can't tell you how hearbroken I am 'bout all that.

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