Policing the world is a tough job. While George W. Bush was trying to make sure the US will have a steady oil-supply from the middle-east, he neglected the trouble from the far-east. A small country there, called North-Korea has been trying to get his attention for a long time now. Like a little kid that does not get its way, North-Korea has been holding it’s breath, jumping up and down and threathening the world. And today they allegedly had their first nuclear test. And I am quite sure it was no coincidence that it was on the same day that South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon has been nominated by the UN Security Council as the successor to Secretary General Kofi Annan.
The reason I say “allegdly” is because it was an underground test and there is no way to verify North-Korea’s claim until some experts agree on it.
Also the test was obviously with a low-yield weapon. As Wikipedia explains:
Russian sources claimed the bomb’s yield at between 5 and 15 kilotons.[4][5] The Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources initially made an estimate of 550 tons for the yield, but later raised their estimate to 800 tons.
Jane’s Defence Weekly reported “Initial and unconfirmed South Korean reports indicate that the test was a fission device with a yield of .55 kT … The figure of .55 kT, however, seems too low given the 4.2 register on the Richter scale. This could suggest — depending upon the geological make-up of the test site — a yield of 2–12 kT.”
By comparison, the first plutonium-core bomb tested by the United States (Trinity test) had a yield of 20 kilotons of TNT, and the first nuclear device detonated by India in 1974, though of primitive design, had a yield in the region of 12 kilotons of TNT. If the North Korean nuclear test is less than even a kiloton in yield, it would be a historically small inaugural nuclear test. Even if it were as many as 9 kt it would be the smallest nuclear test ever conducted by a state as its first test.
If the North Korean device has fallen significantly short of its predicted yield, it could be classified as a fizzle, indicating that some aspect of the nuclear weapon design or material production did not function correctly. In plutonium-based weapons this can result from predetonation, insufficient precision in the explosive lenses used to compress the plutonium core, or impurities in the plutonium itself, among other factors.
An official in France’s Atomic Energy Commission reported that they estimated the blast was “about or less than a kiloton” and expressed uncertainty about whether or not the blast was actually nuclear or not. There are some cases of planned and unplanned kiloton explosions reaching the levels of small nuclear detonations, such as the U.S. “Minor Scale” explosion from 1985, which used conventional explosives to simulate a 4 kiloton detonation. International experts have said that it will take some time to confirm whether it was a successful nuclear test, as North Korea claimed, or an unsuccessful one, or perhaps not even a nuclear test at all.
As of 10 October, there have so far been no press reports of corroborating evidence for the assumption that the test was a subterranean nuclear explosion, rather than a decoy conventional explosive detonation. However, radiological, electromagnetic, topographic, and subatomic particle measurements are likely to become publicly available soon, together with more detailed analysis of the available seismic data, which should help confirm or deny the working hypothesis that this was a nuclear weapon explosion.
And lets face it: it would not be the first time North-Korea is playing bluff poker. In July this year they fired a Taepodong-2 long-range missile that had an estimated reach from 3,750 kilometers to 15,000 kilometers (2,325 miles to 9,300 miles). However the one test fired in July, failed about 40 seconds after launch, landing in the Sea of Japan. North Korea’s missile arsenal also includes the Nodong, with an estimated range of 1,300 kilometers (800 miles), and the Scud-C, with a range of 300 kilometers (185 miles).
The US has said on many occasions it won’t tolerate a North Korean nuclear weapon. Now, the question is whether that intolerance can be enforced or not.
But for now it seems that North Korea has become the world’s eighth declared nuclear weapons state (together with the U.S., Russia, France, Britain, China, India and Pakistan – Israel is generally believed to have nuclear weapons, although it has never publicly disclosed such capability).
As one Dutch politician put it: “When we woke up this morning the world had become a less safe place”.