More NoKo Dud Talk
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Foreign Policy, Science, The War On Terrorism
This is the location where the North Koreans allegedly held their “nuclear” test, but some are already doubting the claims. If you’re a Google Maps person, click here to explore the area further.
U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that seismic readings show that the conventional high explosives used to create a chain reaction in a plutonium-based device went off, but that the blast’s readings were shy of a typical nuclear detonation.“We’re still evaluating the data, and as more data comes in, we hope to develop a clearer picture,” said one official familiar with intelligence reports.
“There was a seismic event that registered about 4 on the Richter scale, but it still isn’t clear if it was a nuclear test. You can get that kind of seismic reading from high explosives.”
Not that we can gamble about this, but it’s an interesting idea to discredit nuclear blasts, especially if we can’t see a mushroom cloud.
Still more information that it was a dud…this time from the Wash Post:
A senior intelligence official called it a “sub-kiloton” explosion detonated inside a horizontal mountain tunnel and said its low yield caught analysts by surprise. “For an initial test, a yield of several kilotons has been historically observed,” the official said.A U.S. government official said the North Koreans, in a call to the Chinese shortly before the test was conducted, said it would be four kilotons. The official said it is possible the explosive yield was as low as 200 tons. France and South Korea both issued sub-kiloton estimates, and officials dismissed as inaccurate an early Russian estimate that the blast resulted from a five-to-15-kiloton explosion.
(h/t: Willy Ritch)
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 and is filed under Foreign Policy, Science, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 10th, 2006 at 11:24 am
Perhaps, just perhaps, this was another attempt at posturing by NK - to simulate something that resembled a nuclear detonation and even in doing that they failed miserably. I’ll concede that sounds pretty far off and unrealistic, but NK are just mind-blowingly bad at walking the walk as it were.
If they (NK) knew what they were really getting into, they’d just keep manufacturing the superdollar and pull their necks back in. But given the current geopolitical climate, this timing was as close to being optimal as anything, so maybe NK figure they can get something by blackmail.
In any case, should this turn out to be a massive dud that NK were tooting their horns about… in the words of Nelson Muntz, “ha ha.”