North Korea Claims It Detonated Its First Hydrogen Bomb (nytimes.com)

HughPickens.com writes: North Korea announced it has detonated its first hydrogen bomb, dramatically escalating the nuclear challenge from one of the world's most isolated and dangerous states. "This is the self-defensive measure we have to take to defend our right to live in the face of the nuclear threats and blackmail by the United States and to guarantee the security of the Korean Peninsula," said a North Korean announcer on the state-run network. "With this hydrogen bomb test, we have joined the major nuclear powers." The North's announcement came about an hour after detection devices around the world had picked up a 5.1 seismic event that South Korea said was 30 miles from the Punggye-ri site where the North has conducted nuclear tests in the past.

"North Korea's fourth test — in the context of repeated statements by U.S., Chinese, and South Korean leaders — throws down the gauntlet to the international community to go beyond paper resolutions and find a way to impose real costs on North Korea for pursuing this course of action," says Scott Snyder, a Korea expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. According to the NY Times, the test is bound to figure in the American presidential campaign, where several candidates have already cited the North's nuclear experimentation as evidence of American weakness — though they have not prescribed alternative strategies for choking off the program. The United States did not develop its first thermonuclear weapons — commonly known as hydrogen bombs — until 1952, seven years after the first and only use of nuclear weapons in wartime.

Comments

Re:more dangearous than usa?

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Oh fuck OFF. Seriously. What are you, 12 years old?

Re:Meh.

[DarkOx]

There also is not a lot of reason for doubt. Moving for fission to fusion is a big technological leap but DPRK has from Iran.

Which is another reason why Obama's deal is deeply stupid. He correctly asserts they were month away from a working bomb, and now if the deal holds (I think it will for a time but not the whole time) they are 15 years out. They are getting a bomb either way sure. What is missed is they continue to work with DPRK, so in the mean time:

1) Iranian nuclear engineers gain experience
2) Iran gets the benefit of data from live tests that DPRK will share with them
3) Iran gets access to the economic benefits western trade and access to all those frozen assets in the deal for the near term
4) (Possibly) DRPK is a short term source for enriched materials when Iran exists the deal

So basically the Iranians are doing their home work and rather than a few months from now being able to make a show of setting off a simple gun type fission devices, they are laying the ground work to be ready to leap directly to a more or less modern fusion design that will ready to be or already miniaturized and weaponized. They will either wait out the 15 years or move at some unknown and difficult to predict time before that.

We were better positioned to impede the nuclear ambitions of Iran and DPRK before the deal. The fact that they were close to getting a lump of metal on platform somewhere to go 'boom' was never relevant. The only nukes that matter or warheads of sufficient yield, reliability, that are also of small enough size to be carried on a missile. Until the reach that state they are as a sack of charcoal is to gunpowder.