N Korea Successfully Tests Undeground Nuke

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@Lumpy

North Korea faces a dilemma in developing nukes: once it set off it’s first test device, it would then have all the opprobrium of having set off a bomb, and none of the deterrence until it could field a deliverable warhead.My guess is that since a primitive Little Boy or Fat Man style bomb would be too heavy for NK to deliver and use too much scarce fissionable material, the North Koreans opted to try to build a more modern design as their first effort. The first try was lackluster, and NK backpedaled furiously trying to buy time to improve the design. The latest reports I’ve read were that the yield is estimated to be <10 kilotons. That’s still pretty poor, but if that’s for a lightweight warhead that uses a small amount of plutonium, it could meet the standard of being quickly weaponizable.

It’s probably pretty doubtful, IMO, that they pulled off a “modern” weapon. 10 kilotons is right smack where you’d expect a cruddy Fat-Man clone(RDS1- Russia, Pokhran - India, 596 - China) to be, or in other words, a relatively primitive implosion weapon without a hollow core, sophisticated lens systems or fusion boosting, any of which would have increased the yield significantly.

It’s a lot more realistic to believe that the North Koreans pulled off something like that than to believe that they pulled off a levitated hollow core fusion boosted implosion bomb that only went off with 10 kilotons, and wildly more likely than them pulling off an actual fusion bomb of only 10 kilotons.

I doubt it’s all that weaponizable just yet- getting the thing to go bang was probably the main priority, and shrinking and lightening it is the next stage.