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

Posted by timothy on from the still-weaponizing-fan-death dept.

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.)

1 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. What the fuck has happened to Slashdot?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Holy fuck! My expectations for Slashdot have never been particularly high, but they've also never been as low as they have been lately.

    The stories on the front page have been particularly atrocious lately. So many of them have to do with social "justice", or they're linking to Forbes articles which don't even load in my browser, or they're just irrelevant political articles, or they're just sensationalist tripe.

    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. I just gave a big list of important topics. I'm sure there are others, though.

    I'd be willing to submit articles about important topics like those, but I know that doing so would just be a complete waste of my time, so I don't. After all, none of these important matters have to do with social "justice" and they aren't particularly full of sensationalism.

    Don't even bother suggesting Soylent News. Somehow they manage to actually be worse than Slashdot, if you can imagine that!