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

Smells fishy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no Korean speaker, but did they actually announce a hydrogen bomb explosion, or certain technologies involved hydrogen bomb production? It's not like they wouldn't be aware that foreign organisations would know what's going down, of course, so this might just be an internal propaganda exercise that the RoW decided to pick up on. Maybe they wanted to see sensationalised headlines from the West to prove to their people that they were under threat again.

Why they detonated it

[phantomfive]

This is my favorite theory of why N Korea detonated a bomb, because China snubbed the dear-leader's hand-picked girl band. Things are strange over there.