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North Korea Conducts Nuclear Test
viyh writes "North Korea conducted a nuclear test on Monday, South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted a ruling party official as saying.
A magnitude 4.7 earthquake was recorded by the USGS in North Korea.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has called an emergency meeting of cabinet ministers over the test, Yonhap said."
http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2308/the-second-north-korean-nuclear-test provides a sober view of the latest test as well as other Korean and arms control related http://www.googlesyndicatedsearch.com/u/acw?q=korean&sa=Search topics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCmqzrFL26M
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
Whole N Korea thing is something like a troll guy who begs for ''replies'' or getting banned until he gets the ultimate attention.
There were no news about N Korea for a while and bam, they explode a nuke.
Can a country troll? They seem to be able to do it.
I'm not referring specifically to nuke tests. I'm referring to the threats that North Korea has made to the West, mostly relating to medium-range missile tests. Also, I'm not American and I couldn't care less about partisan politics in that country. As far as I'm concerned, there are very few differences between the two major parties as they're both financed and mostly controlled by major corporations.
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Hint: they're extremely expensive to manufactuer and not really portable. The smallest ones are footlocker or reftigerator size and have a yield of ~1 kiloton, which is practically nothing at all. It could take out a building, yes, but so could a truck full of fertilizer, and horseshit is a lot easier to smuggle then nuclear munitions that give off radiation that's easy to detect.
I am saying this to people who thinks just because Russia and USA doesn't blow stuff up, nukes are over. Nukes just explode digitally these days which means they must be progressing way better than ''Lets blow this thing and see what it does'' ages.
There is a difference. The nuke testing done on computers by the USA and Russia is done for purposes of maintenance of current stockpiles and was key to implementing the 1992 moratorium on testing. The simulations aren't generally about simulating explosions, they are about simulating decay and related aging of the current stockpiles so that we can know what nukes will still go boom if we launch them.
In the US, the federal program that handles this stuff (and puts a lot of systems on the Top500 list) is ASCI - the Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It isn't necessarily a nuke that could be fitted into a missile
The test is being reported as an 'Hiroshima' size yield: around 20 kilotons.
This doesn't mean they have a fully-funtional nuke in the moden sense of the word. The Hiroshima bomb was basically a large gun that fired a chunk of 90% U-235 into another chunk of Uranium, and was a proof-of-concept that was simple and guaranteed to work. And big: not possible to mount on a Taepodong-2. They have hundreds of kilos of Uranium from their pre-2007 nuclear power industry that can be enriched for this type of bomb.
Until they can show they're testing nukes using shaped Plutonium and timed explosives, this could be just bravado to stir up support for the military as Kim Jong-Il hands power over to one of his sons. Not necessaily technical achievement.
Which just furthers my point. If the Chinese goverment really worries about an invasion of U.S. soliders, they are seriously deluded.
Heck, in WWII, the planed invasion of Japan, a beaten, firebombed nation (although not nuked yet) with less than a twentieth the population of China now, was estimated to cause a MILLION or more allied casualties. That was one of the biggest arguments that was given to nuke Japan. Even if we take nukes off the table, a plain old-invasion of China would make WWII casualty figures look like chump change.
I see why the North Koreans would really like nukes, but it still doesn't make sense to me from China's point of view. I would place stronger odds on the Koreas' uniting sometime in the next 50 years than not. Language, culture and blood are much stronger long-term ties than country. Then, they'll have a unified, nuclear armed Korea right on their border. Which will likely encourage a nuclear armed Japan (which they might do much sooner as a result of North Korea's tests anyway). Is encouraging a nuclear arms race on your borders really a good idea? I can't see how having a few more heavily armed, somewhat paranoid neighbors benefits you.
Number 1 is not technically true, they have a very large reserve army which can give that appearance..but South Korea has a similarly sized armed force which is much more heavily armed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_size_of_armed_forces
The Wood Engineer
Japan occupied Korea for the first half of the 20th century and ran the entire country like a concentration camp. Koreans weren't allowed to speak their own language or acknowledge their own heritage. They didn't even keep their own names.
The occupation didn't end until the end of World War 2 and underscored the more well-known rape of Eastern China, commonly known as "the Rape of Nanjing."
There is a lot to be said about this, so here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule
Japan was once a violent empire. This ended roughly around the same time it had two nuclear bombs dropped on it. Strangely enough, this made Japan one of the most peaceful countries in the world.
Japan hides it's brutal history from it's children, unfortunately.
Sadly, Korea has very little left from the time before the occupation. Most historic places in Korea were built ten-to-twenty years ago.
I think your figures are wrong. When I made my military service in the artillery our guns could shoot about 21 km and they where of an older model. The newer model could shot further and this was standard 15 cm artillery.
As far as I know, battleships of WWII could fire to the horizon and could possible fire beyond it today with better aiming - according to Wikipedia an Iowa class battleship could fire it's 40cm guns at targets 39km away.
I wouldn't be suprised if NK has artillery that can reach at least 40 km which is close enough to hit Seoul if you add chemical or biological weapons.