Relax, the North Korean Nuke Was Another Dud
Enriched uranium nuclear bombs are technically much simpler to construct than plutonium bombs, once one has overcome the enormous difficulty of enriching natural uranium to weapons grade. The enriched uranium Hiroshima bomb design was so simple that the U.S. did not even bother to test it before it was dropped on Hiroshima. Such bombs rarely fizzle.
There were so many uncertainties with the design of the U.S. plutonium bomb that it was tested in Nevada (the Trinity test) before it was dropped on Nagasaki. If a test is a fizzle, it is almost certainly a test of a plutonium bomb.
The Iranians have announced that they have constructed thousands of centrifuges to enrich uranium, whereas they have as yet no operational nuclear reactors which are capable of manufacturing plutonium. Plutonium in the amounts needed for a nuclear bomb can be created only in a nuclear reactor. So the Iranians have decided to go the uranium bomb route, at least in the short run.
The North Koreans have a 50-megawatt graphite moderated nuclear reactor which is fully capable of creating plutonium of isotope 239 from the 238 uranium isotope in the reactor’s core. The North Koreans are not known to have centrifuges. Plutonium-239 is the isotope one wants for a nuclear bomb. However, if the plutonium is exposed to neutrons in the core too long, much of the plutonium-239 will become plutonium-240, an isotope which has a tendency to spontaneously fission. This means that too much plutonium-240 in a bomb will set off the explosion too early — the bomb will fizzle. Weapons-grade plutonium is thus plutonium which is 93% or more of plutonium-239.
It is possible that the North Koreans left their plutonium too long in the reactor, but more likely that they are having problems shaping their plutonium into a bomb. Plutonium has properties unlike any other element, and our designers had no end of trouble manipulating it into just the right form for a bomb.
I imagine that the North Koreans are still at least a few years away from actually having a nuke comparable to the weapons we used on Japan, to say nothing of the far more powerful thermonuclear device.
You will have to explain then, why the media which has every reason to under-report the magnitude of the blast, has reported 20ktons as the energy release. Also, the Richter scale measure a test produces is not simply scaled with the energy release, but also with how well the energy couples to the bedrock. Different soils produce drastically different results.
Also, the people making the evaluation of the blast can sample the atmosphere and determine the bomb materials exactly…
…You are saying many thousands of people with direct knowledge of the actual truth and drastically contrasting and diametrically opposed goals are all engaged in a conspiracy to deceive us with no one publicly producing contrary results.
Without knowing more, you have no credibility.
Yours, TDP, ml, msl, & pfpp
Poor NK’s. I imagine as soon as His Highness returns from his family reunion he’ll rectify this, and get the proper technology and equipment shipped off to them.
Maybe the Chicoms can help by forwarding some of the materials Clinton provided to them. Mrs. Clinton can probably expedite this.
They can maybe get some help as well by accessing the top secret materials that Captain Zero’s administration just accidentally released. They should also check Sandy Burglar’s pants for possibly useful documents.
Of course, if the Norks were paying attention to international news, they would realize they’ll have what they want within 2-3 years without using nukes.
The complete destruction of personal liberty, economic strength and national viability of the United States of America is top priority on Mr. Soetero’s to-do list, so they just need to have a little patience.
You just ruined my day. After the first dud, I was kind of hoping that they’d set off a real bomb. That way, we’d know it was a dud, and not a manufactured dirty bomb. Now it appears we’re somewhere in the gray area between “weak nuke” and “dirty bomb.” At least that’s a layman’s opinion of the thing. Do we have any comparable numbers between what a successful nuclear test and a dirty bomb test would look like? Are we talking orders of magnitude here?
(Also, Trinity is in New Mexico, on part of the White Sands complex. They have a monument, and open to the public once or twice a year.)
I wonder what we will do when they get it right?
The scale for earthquakes is logarithmic.
I would wait and see what the seismographs from Japan indicated.
I reckon that it being Japan, as earthquake-prone as it is, has some of the most accurate and sensitive seismographs in the world.
They’re also close to NK territory.
Even a bomb that fizzles can destroy a city, kill most of its inhabitants, and render the area uninhabitable for years.
there is a lot to be gained by stating that the bomb was a “dud”
i read that a good airborne sample was taken post test..only heard that once…not heard or read any of the results…isotopic results would be a great tool in deciding the truth
i sense that this article is a cry for everyone to calm down…calm down my ass..and as for the subject of no Iranian presence at either test…i digress strongly…there is evidence of direct Iranian participation in at least the 2nd bomb test..you must get your intel from Axelrod’s talking points meme or NOKO intel services..along with your so called physics
Iran has increased the number of centrifuges dramatically in recent history…i guess this is just for giggles and grins..and anyone that states true knowledge of Iran’s progress on building a bomb is a liar or a fool…i would only believe Mossad estimates since it’s in their best interest to know the truth
plutonium bombs are more difficult to build…the fact that a murderous country has any plutonium at all is a disaster..several grams of ground up plutonium in the environment is too horrible to contemplate
the truth remains that we have a president who will do nothing whatsoever to prevent psychopaths from exploding a nuclear device in the near future
this is not going to end well..mark my words
Good, glad to hear they are still a few years away. Then we have plenty of time to withdraw from the region and let S. Korea and Japan develop their own nuclear deterrent. They had better hurry though. The US needs to stop trying to fight proliferation all alone. We can’t and we don’t have the national will anymore even if we could. The collapse of the anti-proliferation regime may lead to nuclear conflicts around the world but avoiding this outcome requires cooperation and commitment from other nations that does not exist.
What would a “fizzle” level dirty bomb exploding say 2000 feet above LA or SanFran do? Probable not much by way of real structural damage to cities that have been designed to deal with earthquakes for some time. The nuke fallout would cause havoc. LA’s freeways are nearly impossible to use during rush hour, think what they would look like if the bomb went off at about 10:00hrs local time. All of the ‘bubanites and all of the residents would be trying to get out of dodge NOW. And they would be doing anything to ensure their safety, it would be chaos, mayhem and murder for 100 mile down wind as they fled. Then there would be million, literally millions, of people that would need housed and fed; Katrina to the fourth power.
Fizzle Smizzle, if it’s nuke and it goes bang it is far too dangerous for a nut-job like ‘Lil Kim to have.
Maybe they were aiming for the biggest bang they could get on a rocket. In other words, maybe they are trying to make a small bomb. Maybe not so hot for the obliteration of large urban areas, but a 2kt warhead is still a thousand times more powerful than other conventional rockets and cruise missiles.
There was no radiation from this “nuclear” bomb. How could that be?
” whereas they have as yet no operational nuclear reactors which are capable of manufacturing plutonium. Plutonium in the amounts needed for a nuclear bomb can be created only in a nuclear reactor. So the Iranians have decided to go the uranium bomb route, at least in the short run.”
Perhaps you’re overlooking Iran’s heavy-water reactor at Arak, scheduled to go online in the next six months and produce 10-12 kg of plutonium per year.
One other possibility: they built a sub-megaton Pu bomb (a la Pakistan), and told the world that it was Hiroshima-sized in the hope that the world would buy that at face value.
Isn’t the absence of the relavent isotopes in the samples proof that the explosion wasn’t nuclear? That’s what it sounds like to me, a complete amateur. If it wasn’t a nuclear detonation, why hasn’t there been a media correction – say, by MSNBC?
Well I feel so much better now but since Obama will still be in power in a couple of years when the Norks and Iranians get their crap together, what difference does it make?
Whew, that makes me feel better! I can relax for the day instead of competing the bomb shelter in the back yard. What was the phrase we used as children of the 60′s??? Oh, yeah, “Duck and cover”….
Wait a minute, Bohemond. Iran is building a *heavy-water* reactor? I hadn’t heard that. Have you proof? If so, then Ahmaddejihad’s claim that his enrichment program is for nuclear power is really out the window. A heavy water-moderated reactor requires no enriched uranium at all. You can use natural uranium as it comes straight from the ground. So what are Iran’s centrifuges for then, if not a bomb? Interesting. Why has this not made the news? As if I didn’t already know.
A minor quibble to an informative article. The Trinity test was in New Mexico, near Alamogordo.
Time for a nuclear engineer to answer some questions. Fortunately, I happen to be one.
1. I suppose it’s possible that the geological data was revised, but the calculations I ran based off of the preliminary data stated that it was 5 kT of seismic energy, and since one would not expect all the energy from the blast to go into seismic waves, 10-15 kT is a reasonable estimate.
2. Sniffer planes are used to pick up radioactive Xenon isotopes to measure the size and composition of the bomb. The problem is that Xenon isotopes and their parent nuclei have half lives of less than ten hours, but the sniffer planes took four days to arrive on the scene. Most of the Xenon decayed away before the sniffer planes arrived, and the Xenon was further diluted by convection. We can’t trust anything the sniffer planes said because they arrived too late.
3. Unless the tamper is built out of cobalt, no nuclear bomb will render cities uninhabitable for years.
dan, you ask why hasn’t there been a media correction. The government’s propaganda machine wants US citizenry to be scared so government can have even more power and spend even more money and citizens become enslaved as no other country before.
I remember how the US government scared the people in the 1950′s with the idea that Russia (CCCR) was going to blast US little children to dust. Ask yourself, did Mother Russia prove to have the will to blast US to dust. Never. North Korea does not want bad things to happen to US any more than Russia does. NK just wants to sell stuff. The only thing to fear is fear itself (FDR) is true today as it was in 1942.
With the communist raised muslim president you just elected the terror spreads over the planet, even to Russia. It is US the world fears.
17, that’s right. Centrifuges and heavy water are an either-or proposition if all you’re after is power. Of course, their argument is going to be that they need a diversity of technologies. They wouldn’t need centrifuges if all of their reactors where D2O. If there are some of each, then they need everything.
Convenient, isn’t it?
Enriching uranium would make it last longer in a D2O reactor, but it isn’t necessary. The scarier thing though is that D2O reactors don’t have to be shut down to be refueled. That is scary, because it can produce large amounts of weapons grade plutonium, and no one would be the wiser.
@20, Tovarich,
Mother Russia didn’t bomb the little US children to radioactive dust because they new *for sure* that we would return the favor and they wanted to live as much as we did. Today it’s different: Obama’s in office now, not Truman, so it’s very much not clear that we would retaliate. Kim may, with very good reason, believe that the US response to the loss of Anchorage would be to apologize to the Norks for building a town in the path of their peaceful missile and, besides, Alaska is Sarah Palin’s state, so who cares? We also know that Muslims believe they will be given 70 virgins in heaven if they die while killing infidels, so they don’t care if we do bomb them in response to the loss of New York. For those reasons I am *very* afraid, and I have been made so by simply observing our enemies and believing what they have very plainly said, over and over again. Government propaganda (either US or Russian) has no effect on that opinion.
@21, Boomer,
DHO is cheaper, but that’s trivial. What isn’t is the fact that the Iranian enrichment “crisis” could have been avoided if either their good buddies, the Russians, would have sold them some of their graphite reactors, or the Canadians’ some of their heavy-water ones and then there would be no need for any enrichment. The fact that Iran didn’t go that route is, as you said, “convenient”. Iran’s after the bomb and anybody who believes that hooey about nuclear power is dumber than Obama.
#20 tovarisch – The Cuban Missile Crisis resulted from the nuclear competition. The USSR put intermediate-range nukes into Cuba. With just a few minutes flight-time, they could decapitate our government. You’re right. They didn’t want to destroy us. They did this to gain advantage so they could ENSLAVE us with Communism. We faced them down. We were willing to die (and take them with us) rather than be enslaved. They backed down.
The NorK’s want the nukes for the same reason: leverage. Now ask yourself, who uses nukes for leverage? A madman.
Iran is even worse. They wish to usher in the return of the mahdi, their version of the second coming. This, of course, requires some serious amount of death, destruction, and mayhem…. Seriously nuts!
RBMK (graphite moderated) reactors are hilarious- because they are incredibly foolishly designed. Even the name sounds haughty: Reactor of Great Power by Method of Channels. Chernobyl was one such reactor, and it exploded. Why? Because the design was inherently unsafe. See, unlike water, graphite doesn’t lose density when it overheats, so a graphite-moderated light water-cooled reactor will lose its coolant and neutron poison, but not its moderator, if it overheats. Thus, overheating actually causes the power output to increase at a super-exponential rate, leading to an explosion.
As for DHO, it may be cheaper than D2O, but it also has half of the neutron capture cross section as H2O, verses D2O, which has 1 part in 10,000 of the capture cross section of H2O (oxygen is for all intents and purposes invisible to neutrons- compared to hydrogen isotopes, O-16 has a negligible cross section both for scattering neutrons and capturing them. Therefore, as far as a nuclear reactor is concerned, water is just a very dense form of hydrogen.).
#25 myth buster:
” See, unlike water, graphite doesn’t lose density when it overheats, ”
Yeah, but it WILL incandesce…and you gotta admit, that looked great on video, (too bad about the cameraman).
@25, Buster,
You are right about D2O. My lame attempt at humor was hastily thought out and technically incorrect. About graphite reactors, however, I beg to differ. They can be designed properly. One of the Unites States’ first “power” reactors was at Hanford, WA. Designed to produce plutonium for our weapons it sold the “waste” heat to generate electricity. It was a graphite moderated reactor and ran without incident until our need for plutonium was eliminated by the various treaties that limited our stockpile of weapons. Also at Fort St. Vrain in Colorado was an experimental graphite reactor which was shut down because it was too expensive to run and had many outages due to its experimental nature, not for safety reasons. It was gas cooled, using helium. A loss of helium coolant would have meant substituting air which would have served well enough to avoid a meltdown.
The Russian RBMK reactors are another story. However, there are several still in existence and still operating, despite their inherent design flaws. Chernobyl was a disaster only because the graphite core caught fire and launched almost the entire inventory of radioactive fission fragments high into the atmosphere. If Chernobyl had had a containment structure like all American reactors, that fire would never have occurred. Likewise, if the operators had been trained properly instead of kept in the dark by the Soviet’s pathological need for secrecy they never would have tried to run the plant in an unsafe manner and the accident would never have occurred. Likewise, if the plant had an emergency coolant supply like all US reactors it would not have overheated. Likewise if it was made impossible to operate the reactor with all of the control rods out (for a brief time!) the accident would have never occurred. And on and on and on. What would you prefer, a Russian RBMK in Iran (with containment, emergency core coolant, properly trained operators, etc.) or a uranium enrichment facility making bomb grade U-235?
Also, while it is possible to burn U-235 more efficiently in a heavy water reactor by enriching natural uranium, why would you do it? You can also increase the efficiency of your car by burning pure iso-octane, but not by much and the cost of refining gas to the level of a pure substance would be hideously expensive. The whole point of an expensive heavy water reactor is to avoid the even greater expense of enrichment. If you have a heavy water plant, as, I guess the Iranians will soon have, the existence of an enrichment facility can only be for a bomb.
Finally, what’s to prevent the Iranians from shutting down a reactor every month or so to retrieve the bomb grade Pu-239, and just not telling anybody about it. It’s not like they are going to permit UN inspectors or anything like that. Why would they need Pu-239 when they have U-235? A U-235 bomb is much easier to make. Given the choice, I would prefer them to have plutonium rather that uranium for a bomb. More chance for a fizzle, which brings us back on topic. Somewhat.
The Trinity Test in 1945 actually occurred near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
The Nevada nuclear test sites were not established until after the end of WWII.
not good news for caroline glick, who’s trying to establish a connection between north korea’s nukes and iran… in preparation, i spose, for the new “new pearl harbor” that some neocons want.
nobody can come up with evidence of iran’s nuke weapons program, so caroline has to go off on this north korean tangent, in which north korea supplies iran with bombs iran can use in attacks on… israel? …america? …what’s the difference.
but now we got this dingbat badmouthing north korea’s nukes.
get with the program, mr tipler.
i mean, how can israelis, in good conscience, touch off a 50 kiloton nuke in manhattan or tel aviv if the iranians dont have nukes and the north korean nukes are duds, and so cant be blamed for a nuke attack on anyone?
but maybe it would be better if the israelis did a false flag dud, rather than a full-tilt blast, huh? …given the proven effectiveness of the media, even a dud could be blown up into an excuse to nuke iran.
once you’ve abandoned your morals, anything’s possible.
In my opinion, the article (while a good article) misses the point. The NK’s are trying to build a bomb and maybe (a big maybe) are not having as much success as they were hoping for. It is their intent which is the whole point. Even if the latest blast was a dud, which is arguable, make no mistake that they are getting closer all the time. Additionally, they’ve recently fired up a reactor to make more Plutonium for more bombs. And even if the latest attempt was a dud it still is not to be questioned what the result would be if it exploded over a city.
Personally, I don’t believe that the NK’s will ever nuke anybody except in self defense. I think they are just wanting to use it as a bargaining chip and a deterrent. Further, I just don’t buy that the generals in the NK military would use such a device on a whim-or even if Mr. Kim ordered it without a lot of serious consideration. I think a coup would be much more likely in that instance. Let’s face the fact that-contrary to media reports-Kim is not crazy. He’s managed to thwart every sort of sanctions and talks, stall for time to develop the technology further, and remain in power for a number of years while controlling the military. He’s not going to nuke anybody. It’s all a game. It plays well to the nationalism that’s inherent in North Korea.
The real problem is that he could sell this technology-or even finished weapons-to non-state actors or even Iran. That having been said, if Iran got the bomb (even from Kim) would it nuke Israel? Not likely, IMHO. The Iranians are not crazy either. They know that Israel would completely wipe them out with their nukes. Again, it’s for self preservation and deterrence, not offensive war. I don’t really blame either regime for wanting the ability to deter the US or Israel from military strikes. I further think that President Bush’s policy of preemptory war had the exact opposite effect that was intended-it scared the crap out of Iran and NK to the point of them needing a nuclear deterrent. I could be wrong. Iran could nuke Israel. I just don’t think it’s likely.
If Al Qaeda gets hold of one, though, it means big trouble.
regards
Do not relax! The NK have failed again but they restarted a reactor to make Plutonium. This is vastly easier to refine than the extraction of uranium 235. They may not succeed yet but nukes really are not that hard.
20. tovarish:
“The only thing to fear is fear itself (FDR) is true today as it was in 1942.”
FDR said that after the most devastating attack on our Navy ever.
A few people still seem to doubt that Iran is working on nuclear weapons.
Satellites are launched with liquid-fuel rockets (Saturn, Atlas, Ariane, Energia, and so on). Nukes are launched with military rockets, which are solid fueled whenever possible (Minuteman, Peacekeeper, SS-20, Scud, even the Qassam).
The exceptions are few: There are just a few liquid fuel weapons rockets, including the German V1 and V2 of 60 years ago. And the space shuttle launches with a hybrid.
Iran has a vibrant and robust program of long-range surface-to-surface solid fuel rockets. They are only useful for launching nuclear weapons. See this Strategy Page article.
Hey neverquit,
FDR said that in 1932, not 1942 after Pearl Harbor. It was aboujt the Great Depression, not WW2.