How We Know North Korea Didn't Detonate a Hydrogen Bomb

StartsWithABang writes: The news has been aflame with reports that North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb on January 6th, greatly expanding its nuclear capabilities with their fourth nuclear test and the potential to carry out a devastating strike against either South Korea or, if they're more ambitious, the United States. The physics of what a nuclear explosion actually does and how that signal propagates through the air, oceans and ground, however, can tell us whether this was truly a nuclear detonation at all, and if so, whether it was fusion or fission. From all the data we've collected, this appears to be nothing new: just a run-of-the-mill fission bomb, with the rest being a sensationalized claim. (Related: Yesterday's post about how seismic data also points to a conventional nuke, rather than an H-bomb.)

Comments

Whew

[fph il quozientatore]

Just a normal fission nuke? Oh, ok, we're safe then.

Re:What the fuck has happened to Slashdot?!

[PopeRatzo]

While we're getting all of these shitty submissions ending up on the front page, there are all sorts of real issues we should be discussing. I'm talking about stuff like:

* The destruction of the GNOME project thanks to the horribly failed GNOME 3 debacle.
* The destruction of the Firefox web browser thanks to numerous fucking idiotic changes being forced on its users by Mozilla.
* The destruction of Linux as a viable OS, especially when used on servers, all thanks to systemd being forced by all of the major distros.
* The fall of the GPL thanks to people wanting to use truly free licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses.
* The fall of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
* The Rust and Perl 6 programming language disasters.
* The Go and Swift programming language success stories.
* The rise of FreeBSD and OpenBSD, thanks to systemd ruining Linux.
* Microsoft porting .NET to OS X and Linux.
* Firefox OS failing worse than nearly any software project has failed in a very long time.

I wish that we could go back to discussing important matters like we used to.

Jesus wept.