Is Iran About to Test a Nuclear Bomb In North Korea?

Fox News ^ | 12/30/10 | Reza Kahlili

[TSgt]

Meanwhile...

Mmmmmmmmm lime shave ice mmmmmmmmm

[OneWingedShark]

Wow / Interesting.
Why is it there and how’d you find out about it?

[Chode]

i'd be kinda embareassing to the Rorney One if the goathumper bomb actually detonated with a measurable yield as opposed to their less than stellar attempts

[TXnMA]

It was front page news for months...

Been on display as a trophy right in the middle of Pyongyang ever since.

USS Pueblo -- ELINT ship -- captured (with its crew ) by the Norks on January 28, 1968. We should have sunk it -- with our largest TN device -- right in the center of Pyongyang -- immediately, or, at least as soon as our crew was released.

Had we done so then, we would have no worries now about terrorist countries capturing our planes, embassies, etc.

[struggle]

Remember the last “nuclear test” North Korea did? It was around .5 KT yield with no noticed radioactive leakage of gas until a week after when people verbally were noticing that no radioactive gas leaked?

I still think that test was a faked trainload of TNT blown up in the mountains.

And yeah, I hope some idiot Iranian brings stuxnet with him too....

Both countries are ripe for a revolution.

[backwoods-engineer]

Iran is using Uranium. Unlike Pu, the shape of the U235 doesn’t really matter once it reaches critical mass. A simple rail-gun will set it off.

It's easier than that: with the right casing (proper amount of beryllium and heavy enough to contain the initial neutron storm), all you have to do is use an explosive to plop one sub-critical chunk of uranium into another bigger chunk, that becomes critical when "assembled".

Remember, in WWII, "Fat Man" (a gun-assembly uranium bomb) was considered to be so reliable it wasn't even tested before being dropped on Japan.

[Sola Veritas]

“By the late 1950s the US and USSR abandoned U235 bombs entirely because they were too dangerous to handle”

I don’t know the answer on the “danger” of U235 warheads, but you are in error about them being abandoned in the 50s. The military still had canon fired tactical nukes in the 80s. Army field artillery units (155mm & 203mm) routinely trained for using them.

That U235 is easy to get in a supercritical state makes it ideal for a nuclear newcomer.

You are correct that Pu239 weapons design is a much more challenging thing accomplish. The first atomic bomb (a Pu239 weapon) (Trinity) that was tested at Almagordo, NM was done so because they weren’t entirely sure it would work. The first U235 weapon was tested by dropping it on a Japanese city...because they were certain it would work.

[chimera]

The gun-assembly 235U bomb was named “Little Boy”. The “Fat Man” was the plutonium weapon used at Nagasaki. Check out their form factors for the naming conventions. The Trinity test article was The Gadget, since it was not yet weaponized.

[RayChuang88]

If I remember correctly, the device tested at the Trinity site had the same fissile material shape as the Fat Man bomb, but they surrounded it with a lot of extra material and test sensors because nobody at Los Alamos knew if this device would actually work. But once the bomb was successfully tested on July 16, 1945, they could assemble Fat Man with assurances it would actually work.

[Cindy]

A Look at Iran
http://www.truthusa.com/IRAN.html

[Islander7]

Sooner or later we will have to deal with both of these maggots. Venezuela is taking Iraq’s place in the Axis of Evil. We live in interesting times.

[PIF]

0 says we can absorb an attack or some such nonsense

---

O’ he’s very correct... he can. Several million dead Americans and millions more casulties are no biggy to him. He’ll be on an extended vacation somewhere and things will be just fine; he will have absorbed the attack in good shape.

[chimera]

0 says we can absorb an attack or some such nonsense.

That's his "strategy", just take the hit and do nothing, or, maybe, at most, have Holder and his latest stooge, Cole, call the cops.

Of course, Obama will get away with it, and probably be lauded for his "thoughtfulness" and "restraint", by the media 'Rats. Imagine if Bush on 9/11 said we'll do nothing, we can take the hit. The media would have crucified him even more than they already did (if that's possible). Imagine if Roosevelt said after Pearl Harbor, we can take the hit, and did nothing. But the country has decayed so much under Obama that this is probably what will happen.

[chimera]

Yes, the plutonium core was the same. That design remained the same until the latter 1940s when the first levitated core designs came into use. That led to the boosted fission weapons, which were the progenitors of the thermonuclear weapons of the early 1950s.

[lbryce]

lol. Exxxxtrrrreeeeeeeeeeeemmeeeeeeelllllllyyy funny.