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."

Comments

If North Korea says so...

[mi]

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)...

Re:If North Korea says so...

[SydShamino]

Even without WMD Iraq is no cakewalk (as we see in present day).

The present-day insurgents weren't in Iraq until after we removed Saddam from power. He ran a run-of-the-mill dictatorship that used his religion (and that of most of his country) as a tool to control people, but he was no religious fanatic. He disliked the Taliban and the Bin Laden extremists almost as much as the U.S. does.

Saddam's Iraq was a cakewalk. We "accomplished" that mission quickly, efficiently, and with minimal casualties on our side. Then, we started screwing almost everything up, and haven't stopped yet. We needed to create a stabler, more secure country faster, before zealots and extremists had time to enter the country and set up shop. Probably having more troops from a wider variety of allies would have helped tremendously, but that would have required us to earn more allies through discourse and compromise, something this administration is not able to do.

Had we not entered Iraq, Saddam would have continued to do an adequate job of suppressing religious fanatics, and Iraq would not have become another Taliban country. (He would have continued suppressing his own people, too; he was still a dictator, murderer, and thug. I'm not denying that. But there are plenty of other murderous dictators in power around the world, some of which are our allies.) Overall, we've probably left the country in worse shape than if we'd just left it alone.

We should have sent many, many more troops to Afghanistan (where we had internation support and justification for our invasion) to avoid the problems that country is having - resurgent Taliban because we didn't kill them all back then when they were in the open, and the country falling back into its longtime role as the world's opium supplier (something the Taliban had tried to suppress, but now profits from).

Re:If North Korea says so...

[Chris Burke]

No, the sarin was not largely potent, it was degraded and no longer sarin at all.

Bush claimed that Saddam had an active program and was continuing to stockpile. This is false, and continues to be false.

The only WMD that have been found are the ones that nobody on earth doubted he had. That they were badly accounted for is also not in doubt, as it was all part of Saddam's suicidally stupid bluff. It was not a "stockpile" if it was not maintained, and hence claiming that he had WMD is incorrect if you accept that an impotent WMD is not a WMD.

No relevent devices have been found to this day.

Re:In Other News

[lawpoop]

I think the news is that there is still *no* confirmation. North Korea said they were going to test a nuclear bomb, there was an explosion, and AFAIK, they claimed success. However, we're a week out and we are still not sure.

So yes, we should know by now, but we don't. This is news.

Especially since

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:In Other News

[Lally Singh]

This is really the best confirmation data we have. DPRK says they set off a nuke. Even if a nuke had fizzled, it would've been bigger than the 550T explosion the seismometers felt. From here, "A geology professor at Yale, Jeffrey Park, emails to tell me that the updated Richter magnitude for the North Korea event is 3.5, which he calls "mighty small for a crude nuke." And that's true: it suggests a very small yield. But the odd thing is that it's actually harder to build a 1 kiloton weapon than a 5 or 10 kiloton weapon, and it's unlikely North Korea has the expertise to do this."

So, nobody's really sure what to believe right now, and eventually it'll just fall to consensus on the data we already have.

The best place to hear about the debate's over at ArmsControlWonk. New radionucliotide data, insider info from some well-placed anonymous sources, and insights into the scientific cultures within dictatorships paints an interesting picture.