Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Not with a bang but a whimper – From Fox News: “North Korea nuke test may be less than claimed” – “A growing chorus of intelligence sources was leaning Tuesday toward the conclusion that North Korea's claim that it successfully detonated a nuclear weapon last Sunday may be more bluster than blast.” I find it hard to believe that even an underground explosion wouldn’t tick up radiation levels in the atmosphere.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Lack of radiation is not substantive of anything.... Unless it is the 60's. Most tests today involve testing the explosive compression necessary to collapse a Plutonoim pit. These are highly subcritical and in some cases not radioactive at all. This is, for example how India and Pakistan tested theirs. They used detonations of initiators to test feasability of an enhanced-fission device, which uses a plutonium pit with a squirt of lithium-deuteride to act as a big neutron bolus to increase the yield 3-10x. That way, a Nagasaki 15Kt bomb becomes a .2Mt bomb with no additional fuel.