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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.)
WARNING: The link goes to Forbes.com. Do no click on it.
a fusion bomb may have much more power in terms of megatons TNT, but it won't destroy more than a medium sized city.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
WTF Slashdot.
Two fucking Forbes articles in one day.
Two fucking StartsWithASlashvertisement posts in one day.
How many more readers do you want to leave? I'm getting to my breaking point!
Fusion bombs aren't that strong. An average 1.2 Mt device set off in the air at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World would likely leave most of Orlando unscathed beyond broken windows and a bad sunburn, and wouldn't even have any effects at KSC beyond hearing it. Running the plot for a much larger 5 Mt explosion shows that while there's significantly more damage, even the nearby cities of Sanford and Lakeland wouldn't be significantly affected.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I've posted this, today, on slashdot and I'm posting it again.
In particular, Fuck Ethan Siegel, the handle resembling a human name used by the StartsWithABang guy, well-known Internet troll and manipulator of disinformation ("digital strategist" in today's Internet dysphemism), who is claimed to be "professor" perhaps of nothing but the art of aggressive marketeering.
dieethandie.
Forbes is a well known scam site.
The website "offers" 17 trackers on a single page serving what they claim to be "content", by the count of Ghostery. In comparison, Slashdot serves 6.
The site claims to promise "light ad" and nags you to turn off the ad blocker. In reality, it's 4% content and 96% ads.
What's worse, the blogs hosted there offers no information that is so unique that is worthy of whitelisting the site in your content blocker. The "Starts with a bang" blog, for example, "publishes" stories that are actually regurgitated, thinly-wrapped, dumbed-down, borderline plagiarism from science journals, websites and blogs. The link to the actual news is usually buried with a wall of distracting text and images copied or re-phrased from the original source. The whole blog serves no other purpose than baiting the reader for the purpose of tracking.
In addition, it appears that the purpose of hosting ads includes malware delivery.
The behavior of Forbes.com is at best sociopathic and outright criminal at worst. They look really desperate.
It's only a matter of time before this hub of mal-adverts gets its page ranks bitchslapped by Google, and pulling down the rank of all prolific referrers, including Slashdot.
Which is completely deserved.
A lot of people think it was aimed at China.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."