Slashdot Mirror
North Korea Air Sample Shows Radiation
Apocalypse111 writes, "According to CNN.com, air samples taken over North Korea have not yet shown any radiation from the event on Monday that North Korea claims was a nuclear test. This is not definitive proof that the event was non-nuclear, as it may either have been so small and deep that it did not let any radioactive debris escape, or perhaps the North Koreans sealed the site." Furthering speculation over whether North Korea has actually exploded a nuclear device, vk38 writes to point out a (free) article in today's Wall Street Journal claiming that the blast could have been
set off by exploding fertilizer (ammonium nitrate). The article points to the
Texas City disaster of 1947, in which 7,700 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded in the hold of a ship with the estimated power of 2 to 4 kilotons of TNT.
Update: 10/14 08:03 GMT by Z : The story at CNN has been updated: "A preliminary analysis of air samples from North Korea shows 'radioactive debris consistent with a North Korea nuclear test,' according to a statement from the office of the top U.S. intelligence official."
Update: 10/14 08:03 GMT by Z : The story at CNN has been updated: "A preliminary analysis of air samples from North Korea shows 'radioactive debris consistent with a North Korea nuclear test,' according to a statement from the office of the top U.S. intelligence official."
Iran has also exploded a nuclear bomb. Or something. We're not really sure. Coulda been anything really.
Seriously though - is this really news ? Shouldn't we wait until it's confirmed one way or the other before it makes sense to comment on it ?
Are we justified sanctioning and otherwise punishing it, even if it lied?
This is more than an abstract question (like the famous "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there...").
Saddam's Hussein downfall was (at least partially) brought about by his insinuating that he still has WMDs privately — to keep neighbors in fear, soldiers brave, and citizens proud, while claiming loudly, that he got rid of them all (which turned out to be true, after all)...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The ironic thing is, the nations of the world are looking to impose sanctions - but can we really impose sanctions if it turns out it wasnt a nuke in the first place?
For years they guy has been openly claiming to be working on a bomb. The fact that he does not unambiguously have one yet is astounding.
With all the information that is public, it *is* trivial to create a bomb. Access to plutonium, which he has, is the hard part.
I hate to introduce politics, but it has to be said, Saddam maybe, could have, possibly, been working on something, if you look at the intelligence "just so." North Korea, has been openly saying they are working on these bombs. North Korea sells arms to our enemies. I blame Bush on all counts. The guy is all about acquiring power, but without the wisdom or honor to use it well.
I am remeinded if Bill Maher, Usually you have an administration that is corrupt or one that is inept. The Bush administration is both.
..a real nuke, but the government right now REALLY doesn't want it to be a real nuke, because they would have to put up or shut up over their "no nukes for axis of e-vile" places. So who knows? They have been more or less threatening Iran now for a long time on the theory they are even developing one, and saying "dire consequences" and a lot of pre emptive strike speculation, etc. So, what can they do to N. Korea if they really had one? Invade, or a pre emptive strike? Ha! They are already on the serious manure list for most everything, what else practically can they do about it? What "sanctions" are even left of any importance that aren't already beng imposed?
OK, get back to the question. If a nuke was buried deep enough and the caverns sealed before the blast, with a very small nuke, would radiation escape to be detected? And wasn't there a lot of talk the other day that the seismograph guys were good enough to tell just from the signature?
North Korea seems to have failed at the very essence of the Nuclear test. The idea isn't to test if your nuclear bomb work, you better fucking know your technology is ready before you even hint you have the bomb. The idea of a nuclear test is to PROVE you have the bomb, and to prove it works, and to show everyone you got big balls. They have not done this, and this further proves it. They might have one, but you don't brag about an underground nuclear test unless you have something to prove and North Korea definatly has that.
Personally I think it proves they DONT have a bomb.... yet. And more likely their real first test will be over Japan/Israel/South Korea/ whereever else, and their second will be during the all out nuclear bombardment where all the countries give them all the nuclear power they need, though they'll have to figure out how to contain it.
North Korea and Iran are both playing dangerous games. They are acting like children at the grown ups tables. Let's hope they mature or get slapped before they become teenagers who get into a massive car accident and "kill" one or more of the adults
If we run around telling him he didn't really explode a nuke then it's only incentive for him to try again. Far better to pat him on the head and pretend it was the world's most wildly successful nuke test and get down to the business of what to do about it.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
I don't know of many underground mines that come pre-equipped with a few thousand tons of explosive. Do you?
AccountKiller
They are using it as a point of blackmail. If you look at their rhetoric they are demanding that the world congratulate them on their successful test, saying that any sanctions will be an act of war (wtf?), and that how they proceed from here will depend on how nice people are to them.
To run with your analogy this is like someone holding a gun to their child's head and demanding you give them money to not shoot their kid. Regardless of if it's a cap gun, the fact that they'd stoop to that level of blackmail means that they need to be stopped.
test is to prove that you have a nuke. Testing publicly before you actually had more than a few dozen seems silly. Nobody in their right minds would threaten to use a Nuke, particularly if they only had one or two. Sure they might cause a localised disaster here - how much damage can one nuke cause to the US - but the response would turn the whole country into a sheet of glass.
Who bets this was a well calculated plan by some sensible N.K. scientists to demonstrate that in fact they have nothing for us to fear.
Of course idiot Kim wouldn't know what a real nuke is capable of, probably felt the earth shake and thought to himself, "cool, now I have a big penis too.". Also a calculated response from some sensible N.K. scientists.
The theory is trivial, and the tech and materials are mostly trivial, again with the exception of the plutonium. But that doesn't mean constructing a working implosion device is trivial. You have to be extremely precise in your calculations in order to pull it off. This is why the culmination of a nuclear program always involves a live test, because that's really the only way to be sure that your math and engineering were correct.
And, because in the modern age there are thousands of seismic sites and many radiological sites that can detect the seismic and radioactive signature of a nuclear explosion, a nuclear test is also the announcement that you have succeeded in your nuclear ambitions. For a recent example of how a nuclear test is both final exam and public announcement, see Pakistan.
So the fact that a successfull nuclear test would be quite apparent (and as we are seeing the absence of a nuclear test as well), and that NK called China to tell them so they would be sure China was watching closely, tells me that this was probably a real nuclear test. A test that, it would appear, failed. If memory serves, they told China to expect a 2KT explosion, with the actual measurement at about 0.5KT?
Sounds to me like they had at best a partial detonation of the nuclear material, but didn't have the timing of the high explosives good enough to pack all the plutonium into a small enough ball for it all to react before the reaction force blew it apart.
Saddam could bluff about having chemical weapons. Kim can bluff about developing nukes, but it really doesn't make sense to try to bluff a nuclear test. And of course we know he desperately wants them. So I'm going with the theory that this was a real nuclear test, just a failed one, and North Korea doesn't have a working nuke yet, but they are very close. The data from just this test may be enough for them to fix it.
The enemies of Democracy are
It's far better that they blow up their own country than someone else's. Just keep saying "Nuh-uh!" long enough, and they'll waste some more of their weapons grade materiel in a mountain compression exercise...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Doesn't this theory assume that the theoretical large pile of conventional explosives is detonated from a single source? Couldn't the signature of the detonation be shortened by detonating the same amount of material with multiple detonators?
What if the explosion in 2004 happened while transporting / stacking explosives to fake a nuclear test?o n_disaster&oldid=79574083
See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ryongch
k2r
Fission actually.
"Aside from the first one, which was the Iranian president and not Chavez"
It was the Venezuelan dictator who made the speech blaming Jews for all the evil in the world for the last 2,000 years. This speech was Dec. 24, 2005.
"But one thing is still true about him, this being pretty much the fundamental law of communism--he's still better than the nasty right-wing fucker who immediately preceded him(Lenin and the Tsars, Mao and Chiang Kai-shek, Castro and Batiste)."
You need to check your history:
Lenin: The Tsars (who had already moderated a whole lot) were gone by the time Lenin seized power. Lenin actually overthrew a fledgling post-Tsar democracy. He made things significantly worse, grabbing for himself more power than the Tsars ever had, re-invading the former vassal states that the Tsars had actually let go free, and slaughtering many hundreds of thousands of people.
Mao and Chiang Kai-shek: Clearly no comparison at all here. Mao ordered more than 30,000,000 people killed. The relatively mild legacy of Chiang has been apparent in how Taiwan was ran after Mao's conquest. Chiang's government, the Nationalists, had run all of China for quite a while before Mao came along: pre-Mao China was significantly lacking in the routine atrocity that Mao ushered in. Do you really know anything about it at all?
Castro and Batista: Aside from the mass execution of political prisoners by Castro, and the many tens of thousands killed by his invasions of other countries (Batista stayed home), there are so many other factors such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press (many beleaguered newspapers under Batista, no independent ones at all under Castro).
Every single one of these was much worse than the one before. That's the fundamental law of Communism.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Every one of those examples was Communist. You are correct that they are "governments run by a single person or very small group where everything in the country is owned by them". That is how communism ends up being out here in the real world. We have seen plenty of communism in all of its glory. What this probably boils down to is disagreements among factions of communists as to which are the real communists. Then it becomes a matter similar to 7th Day Adventists saying that Catholics are not Christians. If the majority of those involved in a movement can't go a long way to DEFINING it, who can? Scores of millions of members of the ruling Communist Parties of these countries can't be ignored.
"The only socialism the world has seen has been in democratic countries."
Socialism is the degree to which ruling elites control the private and personal economic affairs of the people. Socialism has been very strong in the named communist countries. It has been weak in the democracies.
Where were you when the voynix came?