I suppose a breakthrough in nuclear fusion is hardly ‘mundane’ or ‘pointless’, but something tells me the North Korean media are not being entirely truthful here.
However I do look forward to their development of faster-than-light travel, no doubt on Kim Il-Sung’s next birthday. And their first colonist to an extrasolar planet, a birthday or two after that.
pfffft. They have to develop matter/antimatter reactions before they explore other planets. That should be at most three years away from completion for them.
ITT: the BBC has a guest reporter from the Onion.
Eh, every minor advance in fusion experiments in the West are touted in the press bringing us mere inches from power generating, controlled fusion, even in cases where thats pretty obviously not the case, and often when such controlled fusion wasn’t even the purpose of the experiment in the first place. Can’t really blame the N. Koreans for playing the same game.
Call me when they find some interesting condensed matter effect and start touting it as a discovery of magnetic monopoles. Then they will have truly mastered the art of overblown scientific hype.
So THAT’S what happened to Ponds and Freishman!
They meant a thermonuclear bomb. And yes it will (briefly, VERY briefly) provide plenty of heat for most of the country.