North Korea announces successful hydrogen bomb test

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35240012

by forgingahead • 11 years ago

229 168 11 years ago

bbc.com

meeper16• 11 years ago

Not for long.

hnamazon123• 11 years ago

Good for North Korea!

It's important that there be Mutually Assured Destruction between North Korea the imperialist US-backed South Korea.

We have nuclear weapons. Who are we to say that North Korea shouldn't have them? That just wouldn't be fair.

s_q_b5• 11 years ago

Me. I'll say it.

Any regime which systemstically implements slave labor, mass starvation, and utter lack of human rights should not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.

We do not want mutually assured destruction, especially with a nation controlled by a non-rational actor. The principle won't operate.

Unfortunately, it is now too late. North Korea has a fusion bomb. Once second closer on the doomsday clock.

JoshTriplett9• 11 years ago

I would go further and say "nobody should have a nuclear weapon". We only have the one planet.

Can we hurry up and create strong AI already, before someone gets everyone killed?

EDIT: Somehow I didn't expect that offhand ha-ha-only-serious comment to kick off a massive discussion about the capabilities of AI. Fun, but not my intention.

whistlerbrk• 11 years ago

Agree with what you said and I'll underscore the 'especially' clause of your point regarding rational actors. I encourage people to watch Errol Morris' Fog of War which examines the life of Robert McNamara. In the documentary he states that a principle lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is that "rationality will not save us".

Rational actors believing they are proceeding in the best interests of their countries can allow a situation to escalate and cause the mutual annihilation of their civilizations. This was the case when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were heads of their respective states.

No one should have these weapons.

quadrangle• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

zanny2• 11 years ago

The old doomsday clock was about the USSR and US having arsenals of thousands of nuclear missiles to render the world inhospitable if they ever declared open war.

North Korea could probably kill a sizable chunk of the 25 million people living in the metro area of Seoul, but would otherwise not be able to inflict harm on the US, at least not yet. And we would be their nuclear retaliator if they attacked anyone - we know all their military bases, and a nuclear attack on South Korea would see instant retaliation upon all their installations.

While China does not want to deal with the refugee crisis that would result from a post-NK scenario, they would definitely never fight the US directly because they know full well that doomsday scenario would play out in nuclear war with the US.

melling• 11 years ago

Shouldn't they work on getting electricity first?

http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/12/18/n...

sbuttgereit• 11 years ago

You would think. But I suspect the few people that have the power to make use of the nation's resources have all the electricity they need.

Since they simply take what they want from the rest of the populous, the desires of the rest of the people simply don't matter enough.

pinkrooftop• 11 years ago

Is it really mutual destruction if North Korea has nothing to lose ?

viraptor• 11 years ago

The leaders still can lose their lives. Which is pretty much what they care about.

facetube2• 11 years ago

Here's a North Korean prison camp survivor's testimony from 2003. Try to read it without vomiting. This is the country you think should have nuclear weapons: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3071464/ns/us_news-only/t/survivor...

joshschreuder• 11 years ago

Wow. Thanks for posting, I had no idea about any of that. I mean, I knew NK was a serious human rights offender, but when hearing specifics really hit home how bad it is. Atrocious.

moo• 11 years ago

Chang In-suk [1], head of the North Korean Defectors’ Association in Seoul at the time, says Lee Soon-ok is a liar. The Guardian tackles the question, "Why do North Korean defector testimonies so often fall apart?" [2]

[1] http://uskoreainstitute.org/research/visiting-scholars/past-...

[2]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-ko...

yongjik2• 11 years ago

Erm, "Mutually Assured Destruction" sort of requires the destruction to be assured mutually, by definition.

There's no way they can destroy America. In the most lucky(??) case, they might be able to destroy a city or two before getting wiped out.

I doubt they could destroy even South Korea. (Sure, they can kill millions, but South Korea is kinda democratic enough to survive that, and you can bet my ass that the North Korean regime will be wiped out.)

dogma11382• 11 years ago

South Korea is pretty much Seoul and NK can flatten (in theory) it with unguided rockets, Seoul is 30 or so miles of the border this is within range of even some field howitzers with RAP shells.

PhasmaFelis2• 11 years ago

Hm. Wouldn't have expected NK internet propagandists to be paying attention to Hacker News.

jayzalowitz• 11 years ago

The 5.1 earthquake for this bomb would suggest a smaller explosion than the bombs at the tail end of WW2, however that depends on a lot of things. Looking at this list it would suggest about a ~600 ton explosion http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/richter_magnitude_scale

caf4• 11 years ago

The kiloton-to-richter-scale conversion for a weapons test is highly dependent on the geology and configuration of the test site.

aidenn0• 11 years ago

Counterpoint: wikipedia shows a formula that puts it at 44kT[1]. However there is a note that it can vary greatly depending on the fraction of energy that is converted to seismic waves (this formula assumes 0.5%);

That being said, 44kT is still way below what one would expect for a fusion bomb, and low even for a boosted fission bomb.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale#Nuclear...

DrScump• 11 years ago

44KT is basically 3 Hiroshimas.

beedogs• 11 years ago

Here's what 44KT would do to downtown San Francisco:

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=44&lat=37.7564509&lng...

bemmu• 11 years ago

I wonder if they could just wait until a suitable earthquake happens, and then just lie it was a bomb they detonated?

mc32• 11 years ago

I think "they" usually look for radiation signatures via satellites (and other signal collection systems).

dredmorbius• 11 years ago

Seismic, acoustic, and, especially, radiation signatures tend to strongly differentiate natural and nuclear device events.

Earthquakes virtually always develop over both time and space -- the "epicenter" of an earthquake is the center or origin of the movement. Some quakes occur over very long rupture zones -- the 2004 Boxing Day quake off the coast of Indonesia involved several hundred km of fault line, and moved along that fault at several hundred km/hr (this is among the reasons why major quakes can be felt over several minutes -- the rupture is literally happening over that duration, and, depending on the location of the observer, the seismic waves have to travel back to them).

An atomic blast begins and ends within a few thousands of a second -- at the seismic scale it's both instantaneous and a point event.

A bomb will vent radioactive fission/fusion products and their decay products, many of which are radioactive, and have signatures specific to the type of weapon and design used. Even underground blasts will typically vent detectable quantities to the surface and atmosphere.

jonathankoren• 11 years ago

The wave forms are completely different.[1] That's how you can tell it's artificial. Radiation let's you know that that it's a nuke, and not just a pile of TNT.

[1] https://twitter.com/drrocks1982/status/684616925079552000

kordless4• 11 years ago

I'll just mention the last bomb N. Korea set off was 9MT, according to Wikipedia.

ricree• 11 years ago

Wikipedia has it listed at about 10ish kT, with higher end estimates up around 40ish. By comparison, the Trinity test during the Second World War was roughly 20 KT.

Were they actually able to produce a 9MT weapon, it would be more than half as strong as the largest weapons test the US ever conducted.

profmonocle2• 11 years ago

Is there any reason to believe they actually tested an H Bomb? Wouldn't that be a pretty big leap from low-yield atom bombs? It seems like the only evidence it was thermonuclear is that the North Korean government said so, and they're not exactly reliable.

Meanwhile, CNN is proclaiming "N. KOREA TESTS H-BOMB" on their front page, which is a pretty far cry from them claiming to have tested one.

huac• 11 years ago

people are saying it's likely that it was a boosted bomb instead (deadly but far far cry from a proper h-bomb)

and cnn is as usual profiting off FUD

wozniacki• 11 years ago

Listen to the audio of the event:

http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5170265

http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/

kordless4• 11 years ago

Yeah, that sounds like a bomb going off.

sandworm1015• 11 years ago

For comparison, here is the link to the recent quake off the BC coast. You don't need to be an expert to realize the differences between a bomb and a natural quake.

Natural: http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5169662

Bomb: http://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/tools/event/5170265

trymas• 11 years ago

indeed, this north korean 'seismic event' is different than other 'normal' seismic events, with exponential dampening.

but is it still a proof of h-bomb? maybe just ordinary (if you could call it so) nuclear bomb test?

yk2• 11 years ago

Depends, there is a tritium booster, essentially a little bit of tritium in the bomb improves the neutron economy. That could be called an H-Bomb, if we are not too pedantic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosted_fission_weapon

arethuza4• 11 years ago

I don't think it's being pedantic at all to use the widely accepted terminology - "H-bomb" has implied staging since the 1950s.

Symmetry• 11 years ago

If we were being pedantic we'd never use the term h-bomb - we'd be calling them thermonuclear weapons or Teller-Ulam devices if we're being really pedantic. Half the fusion fuel in a thermonuclear weapon starts out as lithium and half the energy comes from fast fusion neutrons fissioning the depleted uranium shell.

dopamean• 11 years ago

CNN front page 5 minutes after you posted this: http://i.imgur.com/JtenBY2.jpg

The colon I guess denotes that what is to the right was said by what is to the left. Perhaps thats a tricky way to say it.

profmonocle2• 11 years ago

They changed it. When I wrote my post it literally said "N. KOREA TESTS H-BOMB".

hellofunk• 11 years ago

Yes, a colon nearly always means "said this..." in journalism headlines.

caf4• 11 years ago

If Jeffrey Lewis says it's "definitely not a successful staged device" (meaning a fission primary and thermonuclear secondary) you can take that to the bank.

https://twitter.com/ArmsControlWonk/status/68457996242311987...

lakeeffect• 11 years ago

Who is he?

horsecaptin• 11 years ago

Wouldn't this cause some kind of an earthquake that's detectable?

ghrifter• 11 years ago

It has been detected as a 5.1

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/05/asia/north-korea-seismic-event...

yk2• 11 years ago

Yes, USGS has detected it. The question is whether it was a nuke or conventional explosive or something else.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us10004bnm#...

biot• 11 years ago

It might even cause a news organization to write the first two sentences of its article about that.

atomic_nuclear• 11 years ago

Surely the first hydrogen bomb was constructed in 1952, not 1958?

caf4• 11 years ago

Yes, Ivy Mike was in 1952.

allep2• 11 years ago

depends on the definition of bomb: Ivy Mike was not a weapon, was a nuclear device, as big as a building

exaltedbaking• 11 years ago

Any time discussion of the DPRK comes up, I inevitably see many people repeating blatant lies about the country.

http://anti-imperialism.com/2014/08/14/western-dprk-propagan...

jqm• 11 years ago

There is plenty of propaganda, sure. However that doesn't mean NK isn't a state dangerous to the world in which you and I live.

scottyates11• 11 years ago

Every time when North Korea wants to bargain for something, it tests a bomb. Nuclear crisis is the only chip for the DPRK to survive in between the US, Russia and China.

thaumasiotes2• 11 years ago

I was under the impression that the whole reason North Korea existed at all was because China wanted it to be there?

WalterSear• 11 years ago

As I understand itg North Korea is there because China doesn't want to have to deal with what will happen when North Korea collapses.

csense• 11 years ago

What happens if the rest of the world decides to strike first with e.g. a massive wave of conventional missiles and bombers, combined with a ton of defensive mines air-dropped into the DMZ?

Would it be enough to take out North Korea's nuclear capability and cripple troop encampments on the DMZ enough that they can't immediately launch a massive counterattack on South Korea?

maxlybbert2• 11 years ago

I think the road to destabilization would be for the US to give nuclear weapons to South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, and then tell China to deal with it.

yongjik2• 11 years ago

"Hey friends, because I trust you guys, I prepared this special gift. I hope you guys like it."

"Oooo a present! What is it?"

"It's a T-shirt with a giant logo reading "FUCK YOU CHINA", with a red bullseye painted on the back. Like it?"

evanb• 11 years ago

South Korea and Japan are already under our nuclear umbrella. It would be a major change in our nonproliferation stance to give weapons out.

bzbarsky• 11 years ago

Getting Japan to accept them might run into some internal political issues; there's historically been some opposition to nuclear weapons in Japan. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Non-Nuclear_Principles for example.

That said, if Japan decided it _wanted_ nuclear weapons, it can almost certainly produce them itself very quickly (order of 6-12 months according to most estimates I've seen). They have the raw fissile material due to their longstanding nuclear power plant program, and the general knowhow and infrastructure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_progra... has some more data.

GordonS3• 11 years ago

I rather doubt that further proliferation of nuclear weapons would do the world any good, either now or in the future

yyyuuu• 11 years ago

why would you want to do that? Kill innocent civilians because the leader has a hydrogen bomb.

There are better ways to deal with this. Diplomacy ... perhaps

umanwizard5• 11 years ago

Not saying an attack is the solution, but diplomacy has been tried for decades and hasn't worked at all thus far.

umanwizard5• 11 years ago

I'm not an expert but according to conventional wisdom, NK has enough conventional-arms firepower (mainly artillery) to do massive damage to Seoul before they're taken out. Looking at a map, it's a bit unnerving how close Seoul is to the internal Korean border.

xerophyte12932• 11 years ago

Does anybody have any idea why is it that way? Considering the obvious threat, why haven't they tried shifting away from there? I agree an entire city can't be moved, bu the "Capital" nature of it can be.

PhasmaFelis2• 11 years ago

A batch of kindly old grannies with popguns could cripple NK's military capability.

The problem is, they have hundreds (thousands?) of artillery pieces buried in mountain bedrock and pointed at Seoul. Even if we dropped paratroopers on Great Leader's palace and captured him in the first two hours, it is simply not possible to find, let alone knock out, all of the artillery within a few days, which is how long it would take for them to level Seoul.

...If any of them still work. An awful lot of NK's military equipment hasn't been maintained for decades and has rusted solid where it sits. So the artillery could be one big bluff, for all we know. But can we risk it, with South Korea's largest city at stake?

peteretep• 11 years ago

Wonder if Israeli steel dome anti rocket stuff would be effective

Update: apparently I wasn't the only person to think of this: http://www.nknews.org/2014/07/how-israels-iron-dome-could-he...

njharman2• 11 years ago

China would retaliate or threaten to. If, in your scenario, you imagine China would be join in with "rest of world" then your scenario is about as likely/realistic as NK saying "sorry, jk, our bad" and surrendering to US/SK (who, btw, are still at war with NK).

FeepingCreature• 11 years ago

I wonder if we could pay China to do it.

I wonder how much they'd ask.

sandworm1015• 11 years ago

My money: a boosted device. A fission weapon with a drop of liquid hydrogen thrown in to qualify it as "thermonuclear".

It had to be an h-bomb. The korean people have been told that the regime already has nuclear weapons. So any test has to be a marked improvement. The only way up from nuclear is thermonuclear. Whether that H contributed anything meaningful to the force of the blast is very much secondary (pun intended).

venomsnake2• 11 years ago

The only way up from nuclear is thermonuclear.

Antimatter. Thankfully we have no idea how to make them yet.

sandworm1015• 11 years ago

That isn't too far in the future. Using antimatter as a neutron source to prime a fission device is not total fantasy. With sufficient resources it could probably be done today on the bench (ie not a weapon). Such technology would allow for possibly very much smaller and/or more efficient fission weapons.

sandworm1015• 11 years ago

What is the significance of the depth being reported as 10km?

Is that some sort of minimum for a quake, or did they dig down 10,000m to fire this thing off? That seems rather deep even for a large bomb, which this wasn't.

mikeyouse• 11 years ago

Initial reports had it at 10km deep -- which would've been far too deep for a bomb test -- they've since been revised to 0km deep, which is what you'd expect for a test beneath the surface.

The 10km was interesting since if it held up, it would have likely ruled out a test, but it turns out that the first readings were wrong.

njharman2• 11 years ago

George Carlin explained this here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMwXR-1oajE

kordless4• 11 years ago

The NK bombs carry the -dong suffix on them, so yeah, he was bang on.

graycat• 11 years ago

Carlin neglected to make use of the Bush 41 statement "this will not stand" -- how could Carlin miss that opportunity!

pluma2• 11 years ago

When did we stop calling him Junior? There's not even a new actual presidential candidate with the name.

Calling him "Bush 41" makes him sound more like a nu metal band than a former president.

lenkite• 11 years ago

If as a nation, you wish to be safe from US invasion/arm-twisting, you must have nuclear weapons. It is the best possible deterrent against US interference. Countries that do not have nuclear weapons must depend on US benevolence - which tends to change from year to year depending on the policies being followed by the US state department and administration.

If Saddam really had nuclear weapons, there would have been no Iraq war and no ISIS today.

GordonS3• 11 years ago

On the 'arm-twisting' side, the UK has nuclear weapons but are regularly treated as a US 'bitch'.

Nuclear weapons are far from the only thing that can be used as leverage.

Totally agree with you about the Iraq war and ISIS though.

bobwaycott• 11 years ago

Perhaps arm-twisting is more effective when the power doing the twisting is known to have used nuclear weapons.

efremjw• 11 years ago

The myth of nuclear deterrence is an interesting concept http://setbpbx.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weap...

simonh4• 11 years ago

I don't find the linked document at all convincing. To qualify as 'City Attacks' we would expect that those bombs would have been dropped on the largest population centres available as targets. In fact they were dropped not on the most populous cities, or on the most populous parts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but actually they were dropped on the port and navy facilities at Hroshima and the arms manufacturing facilities in Nagasaki. In fact the second bomb was originally intended to be dropped on the arsenal at Kokura and was switched to Nagasaki due to bad weather. yes they are cities, but they were prioritised on military grounds.

For civilians, we generally think and worry about bombs targeting cities, but most nuclear weapons are actually aimed at military targets. The primary targets are the enemy's own nuclear weapons, military assets and infrastructure come second and population centres last of all. The point of nuclear deference isn't that if we have a war mum and dad will be killed, it's that everyone will be killed.

The fact is we have vast amounts of direct testimony from US and Russian military personnel and leaders, both at the time and in subsequent interviews books and testimony, that deterrence was the primary consideration in their defensive and offensive planning.

iSnow2• 11 years ago

The primary targets are the enemy's own nuclear weapons, military assets and infrastructure come second and population centres last of all.

Humbug:

"“The authors developed a plan for the ‘systematic destruction’ of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted ‘population’ in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin and Warsaw,” Burr pointed out. “Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day, which prohibited attacks on people per se (as opposed to military installations with civilians nearby).”

But other contemporary sources make it abundantly clear the Pentagon saw any person tied to a war effort as a viable military target. A now declassified 1952 U.S. Navy film on chemical and biological warfare specifically states a goal “to incapacitate the enemy’s armed forces and that portion of his human population that directly supports them.” With similar thoughts in mind, the U.S. Army had looked into radiological warfare and built deadly dirty bombs."

(http://warisboring.com/articles/this-cold-war-study-is-a-cat...)

Civilians have always been targets and always will be.

arethuza4• 11 years ago

Perhaps worth noting that North Korea wouldn't be the first country to bluff that they had exploded an H-bomb when they hadn't - the UK did this with some tests in the 1950s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Grapple

stevefolta• 11 years ago

The Soviets did it too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_4

arethuza4• 11 years ago

I think you could argue that the Joe 4 design was an attempt to design a H-bomb using a different approach that turned out to be a dead end - the US was aware of this design but never tested it.

Whereas the UK just plain lied and continues to be evasive about the matter to this day - probably because the exercise was mostly aimed at the US.

jensen123• 11 years ago

I wonder if this would have happened if the US hadn't been meddling so much? For example Bush's "Axis of Evil".

nitrogen• 11 years ago

After watching documentaries about North Korea with smuggled film, it would surprise me if the country could have turned out much different than it is now.

Tharkun• 11 years ago

Maybe they should focus their efforts on getting their food production going so their people don't starve to death. Just sayin'...

zanny2• 11 years ago

You don't run a totalitarian regime in the interests of your people.

Its profitable to be a kingpin in the NK chain of command. Its what the dick waving of nuclear arms is - look, we have a bomb, give us more free shit.

And it isn't even the threat of war. Its a threat of jumping the shark so they have to be conquered, leaving the region with 25 million destitute refugees to somehow deal with. Just for comparison, the EU is having huge trouble dealing with 11 million Syrian refugees and only 4 million have fled the country.

theworstshill• 11 years ago

Imagine a world where every country has nuclear weapons and methods of their delivery - a true democracy, or a diversity of democracies you could say.

North Korea announces successful hydrogen bomb test

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