You rie!!! It was big BROOM!!!
Smackdowntime!
Ping!
Not it wasn't.
Yes it was.
Not it wasn't.
Yes it was.
Not it wasn't.
Yes it was.
Since North Korea seems to be open to nuclear testing, perhaps we could test some of our nukes over there, too.
You rie!!! It was big BROOM!!!
I've been sayin' lets roll since the earthquake...
Exactly. He tested a nuke. He did what we told him not to do. That should be enough.
I'm convinced he's going to do another test in the not too distant future. Whether or not that one turns out as well as he'd like depends on whether he's willing to give his scientists enough time to figure out what went wrong and to remedy the problem.
How do you have a nuclear fizzle? I was not aware that you could have a partial nuclear detonation. It goes critical or it doesn't, right?
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It's not so hard to pile up ten thousand tons of conventional explosive, and as discussed in the previous thread on the test itself there is some value in convincing your neighbors that you have nuclear weapons regardless of whether you actually have them.
The revised seismic figures were (if I recall right) something like 0.5 kT equivalent. The smallest easy-to-build bombs (those that have supercritical assemblies without hyper-compression of the metal) yield something like 10-30 kT, so this was either a fizzled nuke or a large pile of ANFO (or something like that).
In the last discussion I made a big deal about the Kamioka observatory and how they "should" have been able to see neutrinos from the blast -- but with an 0.5kT blast the number of neutrino interactions is only 1 or 2, so they can't be expected to distinguish a large chemical explosion from a very small fizzled nuclear explosion.
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We had a departmental meeting about this the other day where a bunch of nuclear engineering professors got together and discussed what they thought had happened. The concensus was that this was actually a nuclear device. Almost definately. The seismic signals are the giveaway, and here's why. When a pile of chemicals explodes, they explode on a timescale of the speed of sound. So, the seismic signal from the explosion would be on the order of micro- to milli-seconds. When a nuclear device explodes, it happens in the time it takes for fast neutrons (>200keV) to get across a few centimeters. Now we're talking about nanoseconds. The seismic people have enough experience looking at explosions to be able to tell chemical from nuclear, and this one apparently looks nuclear. It also looks to be 0.5kT or so. That makes it by far the smallest yield 1st test ever. Which either means they have perfected making small bombs (which is incredibly complicated and wasn't done by the Los Alamos people until 15 years after their first test), or they failed in their test. The latter is very likely. They've also wasted a lot of Pu-239 or U-235 (probably Pu) and contaminated their expensive underground test facility. Lets count the days together to see how long they take to test again. If it's quick, they have plenty of material. Only time will tell.
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....is that it was an attempt made with non-weapons-grade plutonium.(? sic)
Yes, you get plutonium if you irradiate U-238 in a reactor, but you have to change the U-238 slugs every few days, or it gets over-irradiated. What you get is contaminated by a bunch of other Pu isotopes which fission much more easily than the Pu239. If you use those isotopes in a bomb, because of the "easy fission" of the contaminating isotopes, the critical mass blows itself apart inefficiently, resulting in a "fizzle."
Why is no one talking about the possibility of an attempted decoupled test? I guess there is fear of touching the third rail of one of the Test Ban / Disarmament crowd's articles of faith, the notion of near perfect detection.
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Tritium? Radioactive isotope of Hydrogen -- will diffuse through small pores (in soil, for example) that other gases can't traverse..
There is a good reason that hydrogen is used for dectecting (via mass spectrometry) the tiniest of leaks in semiconductor packges...