5.3 earthquake today where they’ve tested other stuff. 0m depth, yield is about 15kT or so, assuming the papers I’ve read are right about how well device energy couples to rock. Biggest magnitude I’ve read of yet from their program
5.3 Magnitude Earthquake in North Korea Could Be Another Nuclear Test?
I think it’s pretty well established that they have had them for about ten years.
Yes…they’ve had nukes for a while now…?
They’ve had nukes for a while.
The real problem becomes when they are able to manufacture enough fissile material to make multiple nukes a year, they can miniaturize them to fit onto a missile and the have the ability to launch nuclear missiles from submarines.
They are going to become a world proliferater of nukes when that happens, and nobody will be able to stop them. Right now they help spread nuclear technology to places like Syria, Libya, Myanmar, etc. But what happens when they can just sell the fissile material for half a billion dollars?
Yeah, they’ve had tests before. I had thought they were exclusively in the 4.0-4.3 Richter magnitude range, which would make the tests around 1 kT or less, and conceivably, something they could’ve faked with some radwaste and a twin of something like Minor Scale or one of the Messines Ridge WW1 mines.
5.3 OTOH, sonds to me much more like an actual working fission/boosted fission device. Have they had a test that size before? I hadn’t remembered one.
Weaponization is another kettle of fish, of course, but I’d caution that they aren’t necessarily limited to IRBM/ICBM delivery.
I heard 10 kt.
Knowing that it can be done is 90% of the battle. It’s not like they’re pushing into unknown territory, or even pushing to the limits of established engineering. They’re just replicating what several countries had mastered by about 1970, and they can buy a lot of tech and engineering right off the shelf instead of having to develop it themselves.
I’ve heard it said that the atomic bomb was really invented only once, by the US. Everyone else just copied the engineering, even the Soviets a few years later. No one has really started from physics/theory since Trinity.
Sounds like it’s time for the UN Security Council to write them another harshly worded letter. That’ll keep 'em in line.
Bah! It might be a nuclear test, but the PRK PMK (People’s (absolute) Monarchy of Korea) is never going to blow up a country. If the PMK tried, their kingdom would be eliminated and Kim Jong would be ousted immediately. They’ve tried this “fear us” routine for years with missile launches to the ocean and threats of full-blown war, but as one of my colleagues said at one time, they’re pretty much like Dr. Evil and Virtucon Industries, they can threaten with evil, nefarious plans, but won’t go far.
At any rate, time for more sanctions and time for the same front line headlines.
You can look at NorKo as a rogue rabid dog we’re too nice or timid to shoot… or as a boil on China’s ass… or as a pit bull chained in China’s front yard. I think that even lobbing a crude nuke at Japan would not dispose China to letting the rest of the world deal with their appendage.
Well, the Teller-Ulam design was a pretty big step beyond Hiroshima / Nagasaki.
Atomic/fission == deuterium/fusion.
And it’s much the same. The Soviets may have done somewhat more raw engineering and physics development to create their hydrogen bomb, but again most of it was knowing that it could be done, and approximately how, and stealing/being given quite a bit of critical derived information. Invented once, copied several times now.
ETA: Unless you’re talking about evolution of atomic weapons, in which case it’s still a matter of refinement, not invention. The ZR-1 Corvette and Model T share quite a bit, conceptually, and you could envision the former while looking at the latter. (Tiny pocket phones were fully worked out in fiction while wired house phones were still too heavy to carry very far.)
Does Kim Jong realize that?
The point of having an arsenal of nuclear weapons isn’t to be able to use them, but rather to be able to threaten to use them; that is, the potential for destruction is so great that nations will capitulate and negotiate rather than deliberately enter into a confrontation that could be exacerbated into a nuclear exchange. By continuing its nuclear program and demonstrating the use of crude (and likely undeliverable) nuclear weapons, North Korea has been able to make itself relevent despite its otherwise negligible economic and political stature in Asia. And they’ve played this game well; they’ve managed to receive aid and elude significant penalization for the last couple of decades despite being a largely inept and completely criminal regime. The biggest danger isn’t that the political leadership of North Korea will agree or even allow the use of nuclear weapons; it is that poor security will allow for a rogue actor to gain control over weapons, or that they will proliferate their technology and nuclear materials to other non-state actors who may not have a vested interest in relative stability. The same is true for other emerging nuclear powers, and. this poses the greatest risks in nuclear proliferation.
I don’t understand what this is supposed to mean but if you are equating nuclear fission reactions and nuclear fusion this is completely wrong. They are very different mechanisms that require vastly different initiation conditions and energetic yield per mass of nuclear material. It is true that a fission core is used to compress and ignite all fusion weapons because it is the only means we have to achieve those kinds of initiation energies.
The Soviet Union did much of the original research on the development of their nuclear fission weapons and largely used information gained from the “Atomic Spies” at the Manhattan Project (Klaus Fuchs, Morris Cohen, Theodore Hall, et cetera) to validate their methods and avoid going down unproductive paths. The biggest single aid to their efforts was actually information that Hall provided about producing and separating plutonium.
The Soviet fusion project was almost entirely indigenous, although there is spectulation about some small amount of information that may have been leaked from Los Alamos National Labs. The Soviet fusion efforts were led by world class physicists (Andrei Sakharov, Yakov Zel’dovich, Vitaly Ginzburg) who were quite capable of understanding and modeling the physics of nuclear fusion. Zel’dovich in particular is well known for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, shock phenomena, and cosmology of the early universe; Sakharov was responsible for the original hybrid fission-fusion “layer cake” configuration, as well as the “Third Idea” which was an independent development of the Teller-Ulam concept with some detail differences.
The basic physics of nuclear fission and function reactions in weapons is quite simple, and it only requires undergradate physics level understanding to make a conceptual model that can be simulated on a computer. The difficulties circa 1941 was that computational power was so primitive and knowledge of the material science behind making and enriching nuclear material was so poorly understood that it took enormous effort to develop the necessary technologies to support the design and manufacture of workable weapons. While most of the popular interest in the Manhattan Project is focused on Project Y (the design and analysis work that was done at Los Alamos) there were sites all over the United States working on various aspects of production of nuclear and ordnance materials, measurement tools and methods, the mechanics of fabricating the non-nuclear components of the weapons, and the crucial timing of initiation for implosion-type weapons. The development of later weapons intended for delivery by ballistic missile was as much assuring the assurance of the initiation system (both positive function and safety) and making the device robust enough to survive the acceleration loads developed by the delivery vehicle.
Stranger
Be careful what you say, he has also banned sarcasm
It’s a hasty f*ckup between “equates to” and “does not equate to” and I obviously meant the latter.
Which doesn’t invalidate what I said: knowing something can be done, and the approximate path there, with a handful of key engineering details originally learned through difficult experimentation and calculation thrown in, is nowhere near the same thing as working from scratch to the first successful test.
The USA should give them a couple more. 
This attitude may be the case with most other nuclear powers but North Korea may have a different viewpoint and not see it as a not-actually-meant-to-be-used weapon. I would imagine that Israel and North Korea might both envision significant tactical uses for nukes in wartime as well.
Except that both North Korea and Iran have used their nuclear weapons programs exactly for the same purposes that the existing acknowledged nuclear powers have. For North Korea, it has been a way to force natons (both its adversaries and its nominal sponsor) to take it far more seriously than its stature warrants. For Iran, which is desperate to position itself as the political superpower of the Middle East, a similar need exists, even as its program has cost it many tens of billions of dollars in sanctions. Neither nation has anything to gain from a supposed ‘tactical’ use of nuclear weapons, which even the most deluded regimes would have to realize would result in a catastrophic retaliatory response. Both nations have made pains to advertise their nuclear weapon or delivery system capability.
If there is any nation which is prone to the use of nuclear weapons as a last ditch battlefield use, it would be Israel in response to a military incursion by one of its neighbors. While we don’t want proliferation of nuclear weapons, especially by marginal or developing nations for the afformentioned reasons, the odds that North Korea or Iran are intentionally planning or expecting an unprovoked use of nuclear weapons in warfare is negligible.
Stranger
I suppose there’s nothing to fear from a madman stockpiling nuclear weapons, it’s not like he’d slip a couple out to a terrorist group or anything.