With the exploding of the somewhat “tepid” bomb by North Korea, I got to thinking.
Does the United States or any other country for that matter, actually LOOK for a nuclear explosion.
I mean with North Korea we suspected and an “earthquake-like” tremor was detected, so that gave them a reason to suspect a nuke.
But supposing a country like the Netherlands or New Zealand, which we wouldn’t think would be developing a nuke exploded one. Would they be able to pass it off like a small earthquake. Or would no one even think to look into it.
I know there was that blast in the Indian Ocean that seemed to be a nuke South Africa set off but I still read conflicting stories as whether that is what it truly was.
So I guess basically does the US look at every earthquake-like thing is a nuke?
I don’t know about real-time nuclear detonations in general but we definitely have total watch over potential Intercontinental Ballistic Missile launches at all times. The elaborate early warning alert system was built up in the 50’s as the Cold War chilled down. Those procedures have never been stepped down and the President of the US still has an aid carrying the “nuclear football” with the rapid launch codes nearby at all times.
If you want an interesting yet terrifying story that was underpublished, it was the heroic actions of Stannislav Petrov, a Soviet Colonel. He was filling in as commander of a nuclear bunker near Moscow in September 1983 when their equipment detected a launch coming from the U.S. into the Soviet Union. It wasn’t the first time that had happened and procedures were to cross-check the launch warnings before initiating WWIII. He was trying to confirm equipment aberrations when another launch was detected…and then another…and then another. At that point, his solemn duty was to initiate full nuclear war against the U.S. ending civilization as we know it within hours and he just flat-out decided not to do it. He ordered his subordinates to abandon procedures and did not inform his superiors because he was confident they would proceed anyway. The missiles turned out to be solar flares and Col. Petrov was quietly retired from the military with no fanfare.
Those kinds of systems are still in place (more on the U.S. side) but I hope our technology is a little more reliable.
Yes. Firstly, the International Monitoring Network is constantly monitoring a large number of sensor stations around the world for signitures of nuclear detonations. Secondly, the United States has orbiting detectors that look for nuclear detonations. Originally there were purpose-built satellites for this (the Vela constellation), now the detectors are piggybacked onto the GPS satellites. Russia probably has a similar system.
Furthermore, a nuclear detonation doesn’t look the same way as an earthquake does on a seismograph. There’s a sharp initial peak and a near-instant tapering off that you don’t see with natural seismic events. The IMN stations look for this, along with other signatures.
nuclear explosion have a different wave pattern and distribution to earthquakes. They conduct mainly via the crust whereas earthquakes transmit more energy via the mantle.
Yes. When my dad was active in the Air Force, that’s what he did. He worked at a seismic station in Wyoming, and was also involved in monitoring data from the detectors on GPS satellites after those went up in the early 90s.
I remember watching a show on large scale mining and when blasting a hillside the mining company would trigger successive explosions 1 second apart rather than one big explosion to not mislead other nations into thinking the U.S. was conducting underground nuclear testing.
Wouldn’t the diffraction patterns for seismic waves resulting from multiple simultaneous events be indicative of non-nuclear detonations? A nuclear test is, from the perspective of the seismograph, one big boom. I don’t know what sort of sensitivity and sampling rate you’d need for a seismograph to detect the multiple stages of a fusion device going off in sequence, but I’d bet it’s outside the realm of practicality - or even theory.
Then again, IANAGeophysicist, IANANuclear-weapons-engineer, and IANAExplosives-expert. Your mileage and yield may vary.
I think that people would pick up on nuclear tests even if they weren’t looking for them. A big seismic event away from a usual earthquake zone would be suspicious itself, even before you start looking at its seismic signature. If your test is in the atmosphere, there are plenty of weather stations that look at radioactive debris. If I’m not mistaken, that’s how they found the first Soviet atomic bomb. They could even tell a lot about its construction simply from the distribution of isotopes in the fallout samples.
I am none of those things either. Maybe the mining company was just being paranoid, or came up with a “cool” excuse for not being able to time the detonations simultaneously
The mining company use a series of blasting caps with different delays to more efficiently break up the rock/coal. Nothing to do with possibly simulating a nuke explosion.
