Posted on 10/13/2006 7:18:26 PM PDT by verum ago
The U.S. government has determined that one scientific test, among many conducted since North Korea's announced nuclear test, was consistent with a nuclear explosion, a senior administration official said Friday night.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, cautioned that the administration has not made a definitive conclusion about the nature of the explosion.
"The betting is that this was an attempt at a nuclear test that failed," the official said. "We don't think they were trying to fake a nuclear test, but it may have been a nuclear fizzle _ an effort that failed." The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
If I divided my money between a rocket program and a mini-neutron bomb nuke program, I'd put 99.9% into warhead development. A small nuke can be delivered in an artillery shell.
In order to get an atomic bomb to detonate you need something more than a criticality. You need what's called a supercritical reaction from the U-235 (or Pu-239) to the point where one fission reaction causes more than one subsequent fission reaction. That only happens when you get the materials dense enough and have a neutron emitter than is spitting out oodles of neutrons into the dense hot metal that just got crushed by the explosives. If the explosives are off AT ALL, you wont get the proper shape and density at the time of the explosion and you get a critical but not supercritical reaction which basically works like a bunch of explosives, but not the kiloton yields that a true atomic bomb would get.
The long as the short of it, they tried to make a plutonium atomic bomb but screwed up the design somewhere and got a baby reaction.
There is a section in "Sum of All Fears" by Tom Clancy that goes into wonderful detail (but obviously leaves some stuff out).
"Fizzle" is the sound that is heard by prideful folks, when they hold their hands against their ears too hard. IMO, during the next few years and if you don't already have one, find a nice, rural getaway that doesn't have a city very near the west side of it.
Premature nuclearization. It can happen to anybody.
Come to think of it, that quote about a "fizzle" came from news several days ago. The following doesn't contain the mishmash of several days' news that we're seeing, but it doesn't contain much. Bear in mind that their are powerful economic interests and considerations involved in foreign relations and advertising for news companies. Japan and the ROK comprise a large link of our world economy.
Radioactive material found after N Korea test
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1719206/posts
You forget, they are not starting from ground zero, so to speak. They have the advantage of several decades of open literature on the subject, and probably several years of help from the Pakistani "Kahn" network.
I suspect they lacked something in the quality control, rather than basic design, and the device flew apart faster than the reaction could proceed. Maybe the implosion was insufficently spherical. Or cylindrical if they were attempting that design (It's easier , but less efficient)
And probably puts in some wrong stuff too. I would have.
Again, we just don't know - a small, but effective neutron weapon of low explosive output would be consistent with the seismic data. I would assume this were the case. A neutron weapon apparently requires a certain amount of high-purity tritium; has NK been after that material?
A fizzle, in this context, would be a bomb that "disassembled" (came apart; vaporized itself) before very much of the U or Pu actually got around to fissioning.
There's a mathematical coefficient -- I forget what letter the physicists use, but it's not important -- which describes the average number of neutrons produced from a fission reaction which will go on to cause another fission reaction. In a subcritical assembly, that number is well below one. The challenge in building a fission bomb is to take it from well below one, to as high as you can get it (above one, in the 2 to 3 neighborhood) and to do that in a fraction of a microsecond, so that the bomb doesn't have time to heat up and come apart after consuming only a small fraction of the available U or Pu.
The original implosion device, the Fat Man type detonated over Nagasaki, had a 20-21 kt yield. The second generation weapons developed and tested by the US in the 1948-49 did nothing different except optimizing the implosion technique and the core design to get a faster, more energetic assembly process (getting that coefficient to rise higher and faster). That change alone was enough to push the yield into the 35-40 kt range.
A neutron bomb is a very small hydrogen bomb that's highly optimized to produce a big neutron flux. Given that we have no evidence that the NKs have ever developed a hydrogen bomb at all, I think an NK neutron bomb is highly unlikely, unless they stole it or bought it.
Remember that the US didn't develop neutron bombs until the 1970's. It's a 4th or 5th generation device, not a trivial piece of technology at all.
The much more likely explanation for a 500 ton yield is either (a) a barely-fueled "proof-of-concept" fission bomb, with a possible full yield test later; or (b) a lousy design.
Bingo
The badly-designed fission weapon hypothesis is much more likely. In any case, if the US can "sniff" some contamination and do the radiochemistry, the government will know for sure before long. (Not that they'll necessarily tell the rest of us, however.)
Good enough explainations for me.
What a distinguished group of nuclear scientist.
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