Jesus, is that all? That’s a surprise, at least to me.
I agree entirely, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. But a lunatic like Kim-Jong Il might have try it, anyway, if he didn’t have an actual nuke. I stopped following that other story before it came out that it was a train carrying LNG, though… Thanks for that information.
As for the current news… Well, it might well be the real thing, but I’m still going to wait for confirmation. Not that there’s anything I could do about it one way or the other, of course.
IIRC, it’s actually not easy to make a low yield weapon, because of critical mass needs. ISTR that the Fat Man and Little Boy were as small as we could make them (and even then it was difficult to get them inside the bombers) and the Davy Crockett was a technological marvel for being so small. Setting off a tiny nuke may, I repeat may, indicate a greater level of technical ability than it might at first seem.
Conflicting accounts of how big the “quake” was.
IIRC, the Richter scale is one of those where going up a level means something like an exponential increase.
This was linked at Slashdot. I’ve no idea how to read it/its accuracy/if the site is actually USGS. Any informed opinions would be very welcome.
Here’s the USGS page on the quake
4.2. They frequently adjust the intensity by a tenth or two over the course of a day as more stations report in.
Well, now we know.
Unfortunately, that isn’t “half the battle”.
The battle may just be begining…
How can we tell the difference between a 500 ton underground nuke and an underground explosion of 500 tons of ordinary TNT?
I would presume the “shape” of the explosion would produce a different seismic intensity graph?
No idea of the details, but I imagine that TNT explodes at a different rate than a nuke… and takes a different length of time?
This article from Lawrence Livermore Labs discusses how to detect nuclear explosions via seismic monitoring.
France is agreeing with SK on the size of the bomb, so it might well be a fizzle.