Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Do the NORKS have the H-bomb?

And does it matter?  The first fission bombs used in WWII had a yield that changed over time.  Up until recently the yield was "classified" but all writers said it was 20,000 tons (20KT) of TNT equivalent.  Recently, after declassification of 70 year old work, the yield is now given as 12 KT. These two plain straight fission bombs each leveled a city, with a severe damage radius of a couple of miles.  This is so bad, that it doesn't really matter if you have more powerful bombs.  A 20 KT yield fission bomb is so terrible that bigger bombs aren't that much more terrible.
  As a cold war stunt, the hydrogen bomb, a fission-fusion device was developed.  This device used a fission bomb's heat as a trigger to set off a hydrogen fusion reaction, boosting yield to 1000 KT (a megaton MT) And for a while in the 1950's the Americans and the Russians would exchange bragging rights to the greatest yield.  In actual fact, a yield of 100KT is enough to do anything that is needful.  The Minuteman missile warheads were all 100KT devices at a time when 1000 KT H-bombs were available.
   So now to the NORKS.  They have been  doing nuclear testing for some years now.  The first test was so puny (1KT) that we didn't really believe they had nukes until radioactive fallout was detected in the atmosphere, the seismic signal was so weak as  make us doubt the NORKS had done anything at all.
   So this morning, the NORKS claimed to have tested an H-bomb.  But the seismic signal was still pretty weak, about 6 KT yield, less than the Hiroshima fission bomb of 70  years ago.  Color me unimpressed.  Might have been a fizzle, where the fission bomb trigger went off but the hydrogen fusion reaction did not light off.  I don't think it's an H-bomb until the yield reaches 1000 KT, which is a long way from 6 KT.

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