Discussion for article #244332
Could just be ‘boosting’
Oh, great. Now we’ll have all the Reich-winger waving their dicks (Carly, too) in the air for the next year.
I wonder how long it will be before some candidate gets backed into a corner about (insert your favorite GOP screw-up) and dodges the bullet with, “Chuck, I’m more concerned about North Korea than I am about (screw-up). Obama has shown no leadership…blah…blah…blah…”
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Trump will be proud.
Oh bullshit. Six kilotons? A six kiloton hydrogen bomb? Or a fusion boosted six kiloton fission bomb? Uh-huh. Yeah. Right. Sure, that makes sense. That’s totally believable and 100% consistent with physics.
Either they were trying to test a fusion bomb (or a Teller-Ulam layer cake, or a tritium boosted fission bomb) and the primary fizzled, or they’re just flat out lying about the fusion part or they are so diabolically clever that they’ve invented a way to use fusion to make nuclear weapons orders of magnitude less powerful than fission bombs.
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I was worried about this, until I found out it was an H-Bomb of justice. We could use some of those. Maybe we can buy some.
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[quote=“NCSteve, post:5, topic:30821”]
Oh bullshit. Six kilotons? A six kiloton hydrogen bomb? Or a fusion boosted six kiloton fission bomb? Uh-huh.
[/quote]The translation must be wrong. They took their original fission-ish bomb and put it inside a Ford Fusion. They’re blinding us with Science!
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You can buy a kit on the internet to convert them yourself.
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This is almost certainly a boosted fission bomb. Ivy Mike, which was the first Hydrogen bomb test was over 10 kt. This is probably a boosted fission experiment and hopefully they’ll be able to sniff isotopes and have an answer pretty soon. the radioactive signature of hydrogen bombs isn’t remotely similar to fission ones, so it’ll be fairly elementary to know.
15 mega-tons.
Possible, but as @NCSteve pointed out, 6 Kt is way too small for a successful boosted or better weapon.
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I’m more concerned with North Korean service dogs being issued to local Tucsonans and roaming around our malls and supermarkets.
H-bomb of Justice? And all Pete Seeger had was a Hammer. We’re doomed
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Pshaw. I meant mt. Silly me. Thank you for catching that. So, yeah. Definitely not a fusion bomb.
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Given that they’ve been doing this stuff for 20-plus years and that nuclear-weapons developers ar among the few folks in North Korea who get to eat, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had come up with a very small boosted weapon. (wouldn’t be surprised if they hadn’t either)
Think about it from a strategic point of view for North Korea. They want to be able to put a nuke on a missile, which means small, they have a limited amount of fissile material, which means using less is betters. But most important, they’re not planning to attack hardened military targets – they don’t have enough weapons for that, and it’s a dead end in any case. Their strategic goal (insofar as they have one) has to be about threatening population centers in countries that might attack them, and for that goal more smaller nukes is much more effective.
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Look again. You’ve misplaced a few zeros. And there’s no underground testing facility that could contain a ten megaton detonation. There’s literally nowhere in North Korea where they could test an Ivy Mike or Castle Bravo scale device without catastrophic consequences.
Now one interesting question that does occur is whether they could have been testing a device without actually loading in the fusion fuel. And now we’re at the limits of my knowledge. I have no idea whether a six kiloton primary would be enough to initiate any kind of a fusion reaction and no idea whether, if a six kiloton primary can work, whether that would be a thing even conceivably within the reach of North Korea this early in its program. Or, for that matter, whether there would be any useful knowledge to be gained from such an experiment.
Only Dennis Rodman’s house is off limits when the United States is turned into a “lake of fire.” We should all go there.
Well, as long as we’re being pedantic about nuclear weapon yields (a darkly hilarious concept), I think Ivy Mike was ten and it was Castle Bravo that was expected to be ten and ran away to fifteen.
It sticks in my mind because of an anecdote in “Dark Sun” by Richard Rhodes where poor Robert Oppenheimer, his security clearances revoked, had to call in a favor and ask someone (can’t remember who) and beg “can you give me a number?” after Ivy Mike and got the one word answer “ten.”
But then, I suspect both of you may have read that book too.
Yea I think so. The primary is just there to get hot, and start the secondary burning right? Even a little bitty fission bomb gets plenty hot enough.
I have read it and was going to quote that passage and the number that sticks with me is 15. Mine’s on an audiobook so not sure if i can find it.