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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."
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 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.