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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."
OMG, they perfected Cold Fusion!
Maybe all the North Koreans jumped up and down at the same time.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
I think it's funny that this article is under the Hardware section. Maybe we could get Tom's Hardware to produce a 25-page full benchmark test of this nuclear explosion v. competing nuclear tests, and then we'll really get to the bottom of this.
Pfft, Canada does accidental explosions best: Halifax Explosion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion Atleast 200kTons there...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_Explosive_De tonation_Velocities
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?
I have nukes!
No you don't
Boom!
That wasn't a nuke!
Boom!
Sorry, just don't believe you!
Boom!
No no.. never. That was just gas.
errrr.
Oh.. you used all your material and you are out now?
(reminds me of puss and boots with the mouse).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
How the hell would NK come up with some 500 fully loaded dump trucks worth of fertilizer, and dump it in a hole? It would be visible from the friggin moon.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
..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?
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.
You can seal the site before detonation. It's not that difficult. The US has done it hundreds of times during the cold war and just before.
Also, the estimates (which vary according to which country you ask) are less than 1 kt. As far as nukes go, that is very tiny. How much rad would you expect from this? How deep was the explosion? I know that they registered seismic activity, which was how they knew it happened. How accurate can one guage depth using seismographic equipment?
For some perspective, the US 1954 Castle Bravo test was 15 MEGA tons, and it was a mistake, they were only expecting like 1/3rd of that. The "ruskies" detonated 50 Mt, the largest ever, in 1961. There has been over 2,000 nuclear tests by the world nuke powers since they began, most of them from the US.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
In between bouts of decrying "Sooo Wone-wy", Kim was quoted as saying that news of the faked nuke test was "Inebbidable!"
Damn that Bush -- another false claim of WMD.
Just because NKorea is also falsely claiming they're real, doesn't mean that Bush can slander them by agreeing.
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.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
IANAE (I am not an expert), but underground nuclear explosions do usually not emmit radioactivity, at least at the moment.
As far I understood an article I read some time ago, the gigantic heat of the explosion melts the surronding soil into a glass cave which conceils the radioactive mess.
The problem is only after years of even decades, this glass sealing can (and at some point will) break and set the radioactivity free. Then the radiation levels will boost up... Thats another problem of humanity waiting we create now (our legacy for our kids).. all this sealed nuke-eggs from past underground expiriments loosing integrity at some future point.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
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.
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.
Which is why Kim Jong Il is still in power and Saddam isn't.
Bullies don't pick on those who could seriously fight back.
You can't take the sky from me...
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
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.
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Why, I bomb the locker for a few weeks and then send in 150,000 troops to the locker next to it. What else could I possible DO in a situation like this???"
Fixed it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
UPDATE ON THIS STORY AS OF 8:30PM EASTERN:
US has evidence of radioactivity from North Korea
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/10/13/nkorea .test.sample/index.html
U.S. intelligence statement: N. Korea radioactivity detected
a .test.sample/index.html
From http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/10/13/nkore
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- 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.
The statement, from the office of Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, was sent to Capitol Hill but not released publicly. CNN obtained it from a congressional source.
If confirmed, the nuclear weapons test that North Korea claimed it conducted on Monday would be the first of its kind since Pakistan's underground blast in 1998.
Pyongyang's claim has renewed fears of a regional arms race and that North Korea might aid terrorists with nuclear materials or technology.
The national intelligence office statement said the air samples were collected Wednesday, and analysis found debris that would be consistent with a nuclear test "in the vicinity of Punggye" on Monday.
"Additional analysis is ongoing and will be completed in a few days," the statement said.
The South Korean Defense Ministry told CNN that the United States has informed it that radioactivity has been detected.
The report is in contrast to information provided to CNN earlier Friday from two U.S. government officials with access to classified information. Those officials said that an initial air sampling over North Korea showed no indication of radioactive debris.
The White House said it had no confirmation that the North Koreans conducted a nuclear test.
"We've seen the various press reports," said National Security Council spokesman Fred Jones. "We still have no definitive statement on the event. The intelligence community continues to analyze the data."
The U.S. Air Force flew a WC-135 Constant Phoenix atmospheric collection aircraft on Tuesday to collect air samples from the region.
The intelligence community and the military will also continue to collect air samples in the region and use satellite information to try to collect radiological data that would confirm a nuclear test, officials said. But as time goes on, it will be increasingly difficult to achieve confirmation.
Officials emphasized earlier Friday that the data collected are preliminary and provide no conclusive evidence about the North Korean event.
It is possible there was no radiological data. That could be the case if: the North Koreans successfully sealed the site; it was such a small detonation and so deep underground there was no escape of nuclear debris; or the test was actually conventional explosives.
The U.N. Security Council has agreed to vote Saturday on whether to impose sanctions on North Korea over the purported nuclear test, according to John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
CNN's Suzanne Malveaux, Jamie McIntyre and Barbara Starr contributed to this report.