N. Korea Might Have Tested Fusion Process (Possible Small Nuke Test)

Chosun Ilbo ^ | 06/21/10 | Ju Yong-joong

[TigerLikesRooster]

/begin my excerpts

N. Korea Might Have Tested Fusion Process

Ju Yong-joong

Two days after May 12 announcement, eight times the normal level of radioactive substance Xenon was detected

Government kept it under wraps

It has been revealed on June 20 that the northern most monitoring station under Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety (KINS) detected eight times the normal level of radioactive substance Xenon right after N. Korea announced on May 12 that it had successful nuclear fusion process, key technology to make hydrogen bomb. It is raising the possibility that N. Korea actually conducted a small-scale nuclear test (required) for (triggering) nuclear fusion.

The government sources said, "Two days after the N. Korean announcement (May 14,) air sample collected at Geojin station located at Kosung, Kangwon Province, showed 8 times the normal level of Xenon after run through Xenon analyzer. It is my understanding that the relevant organization and authorities conducted in-depth investigation." Xenon, along with Krypton, is gaseous radioactive substance which is regarded as the clearest evidence of nuclear test because it is inert. In 2006, a few days after N. Korea's nuclear test at Punggye-ri, Gilju, N. Korea, (S. Korean) government also announced that Xenon had been detected.

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[okie01]

Expect the Obama administration to take bold, decisive action.

Against Israel...

[eastforker]

Thank you for all your post. I may not reply but I always read what you have to say.

[StormEye]

... that N. Korea actually conducted a small-scale nuclear test (required) for (triggering) nuclear fusion."

In other words, the North Korean crazies are trying to make a hydrogen bomb (megaton yield city busters.)

[TigerLikesRooster]

P!

[Bean Counter]

So let me see if I have this right...

On or about May 12, the Norks conducted some sort of test that involved a release of Xenon gas, and may (or may not) have been a test of a nuclear trigger of some sort.

And it took over a month for this to get out??

What does this really mean, was this actually a nuclear weapons test of some sort, and if so, what is the significance of the presence of Xenon gas??

As I understand it, a fusion weapon is a multi-stage thermonuclear “device” and is an extremely sophisticated animal indeed. From what I understand it takes a fission weapon to generate enough heat and pressure to allow the fusion to take place. I wonder if the Norks are actually capable of that level of nuclear weapons development given what we know they have at their disposal, and considering the level of scrutiny they have been under since we found out about the A.Q. Khan network. Are they really working on triggers??

I do not want to minimize an actual threat, but I am reluctant to go running around with my hair on fire over this either....

[null and void]

Hmmmm. The fission bomb didn't go boom, and now they're working on a much more complex fusion bomb?

Perhaps the first test wasn't the failure of an atomic bomb, but the success of a neutron bomb.

Is there a new-que-lar physicist in the house who can tell us if a release of xenon and krypton is consistant with tests of an effects booster for a neutron bomb?

[MindBender26]

TRL,

You and AIT are great “Coast Watchers’ for us in CONUS. Thank you.

Am always somewhat suspicious of claims of “small” DPRK tests.

Hiroshima-sized weapons (especially the pie-and-wedge kind) are childsplay as long as you have the U235 or Pu, but making small bombs is much more difficult.

? Your thoughts ?

[Jet Jaguar]

BTTT

[JimSEA]

Isn’t a fusion device a tad bit beyond the capability of the North and their limited reactors? Yet this article is saying they tested the fission component of such a weapon??? Are the Russians feeding them materials?

[NVDave]

Not necessarily. One of the reasons for a small-time nuke aspirant to go to a two-stage weapon (aka ‘hydrogen bomb’) is that you get “more bang for your buck” — ie higher efficiency in the mass->energy reaction. Another reason is that you can create “dial-a-boom” bombs where you have a way of adjusting the yield in the field.

All that aside, once they get a workable two-stage design, you can bet the farm that the Chiapet dictator will peddle the design hither and yon. Trying to deal with the ramifications at the point will be like trying to put smoke in a bottle....

[The Antiyuppie]

Worrisome, but they will have to deliver it with a semi...

[muawiyah]

Someone somewhere took over the remains of the Japanese atomic weapon project ~ which was mostly in what is now North Korea.

The allies never found out the extent of the operations because we'd traded away half of Korea and Sakhalin Island to the Russians to join the Pacific War.

No one even has a good idea what the Japanese bomb game plans were, or what all the methodologies might be that they figured would work.

Their work was sufficiently advanced they had people on site in Japan who were able to determine that we'd hit them with both a Uranium Bomb and a Plutonium Bomb.

One possibility with respect to the old Japanese program is that they may have gone straight to work to develop a suitable fission trigger for a fusion bomb ~ so maybe this is it.

Earlier Korean atom bomb claims and results suggest strongly they have been building nothing more than a fission trigger!

[Pan_Yan]

If they already have a working nuclear bomb I don’t see what the advantages of upgrading to a fusion weapon would be. It doesn’t make them higher on the intimidation scale, just lower on resources. Either the Xenon is a decay product of something else or they are just testing the outer limits of crazy.

[MindBender26]

Actually, the reports of a Japanese Atomic project were vastly overstated. They were primarily the results of the fictional work of a US writer and our desire to suspect the Sovs of almost anything.

Any work the Japanese scientists, and there were a number of good ones, has been far surpassed with 1960s public knowledge.

Give any sophomore physics student a decent diameter stainless tube, some Pu, some Octol and a few other things I won't go into here, and he can make a fission weapon.

[MindBender26]

TRL = TLR

as in Tiger Rikes Looster!

Sorry, my FUBAR

:)

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

If they tested a fusion weapon underground, it would have been picked up by USGS seismometers

[muawiyah]

Irrespective of how "overstated" the Japanese efforts may have been we have before us our own first steps. In a single meeting preparatory to the initiation of the Manhattan Project the theoreticians sat down and came up with over half a dozen ways they thought a thermo-nuclear weapon could be made.

We only used two of the ways ~ and both worked.

The Japanese were certainly in the same league as the fellows who started our own program although they were lacking equipment and reactors, et al, and there were a lot fewer of them. Still, the thoughts were there.

Many of the Manhattan Project notes have been made public over the years and folks have commented on them. Not too many years back in a reference to one of the Japanese physicists from WWII (who'd long since died/disappeared and was not around to defend his work) some (not just one, "some") of the popular science magazines reported that current day physicists thought he may have gotten off on a "bad track" where you could devise a bomb but it would tend to be low yield ~ but maybe it could be used to trigger something else.

Slim thread obviously, but the Korean nuclear program has been typified by stuff that maybe kind of seems to work but is otherwise low yield.

It's doing something or they'd not keep dumping money into it. Now, if they're on the track to make a fusion bomb, we probaby ought to start worrying about it.

[nw_arizona_granny]

Thank you for the ping.

[nw_arizona_granny]

Ping.